Forgotten Memories, Remembered
by dharmamonkey
Summary: Series of short sketches/vignettes detailing some of Booth's experiences in the Army, focusing on the friendships he forged with the men he served with and how his experiences in Afghanistan changed the way he came to understand himself and his relationship with Brennan. A follow-up to "Killing Two Birds."
1. The First Day at Bragg

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

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**A/N: **In early 2012, I wrote a story called _Killing Two Birds, _which is my retelling of the gap between Seasons 5 and 6.

This story is a follow-up of sorts to _Killing Two Birds._ _Forgotten Memories, Remembered _is a collection of sketches and vignettes fleshing out some of Booth's experiences in the Army, from the time he first reports for duty until he receives his medical discharge, with particular focus on the months he spent in Afghanistan prior to Brennan's arrival after the helicopter crash. The gravity and significance of these moments will be apparent if you have read _Killing Two Birds_. If you have not read _Killing Two Birds_, I recommend that you do before proceeding so that you can better understand the significance of these moments and the men like Swann and Bastone who appear in them.

The scenes that will comprise _Forgotten Memories, Remembered _will not necessarily be presented in chronological order, but rather will be posted as they come to me, sometimes in random dribs and drabs, much as Booth's memories of the weeks and months prior to the helicopter crash returned to him as his injuries healed during the course of _Killing Two Birds._

And with that, let's begin.

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**Chapter 1: The First Day at Bragg**

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The Army didn't make it easy for Sergeant Major Seeley Booth. Fortunately for him, Booth knew all about the Army and knew full well that in the Army, nothing is ever easy. That's why he was only mildly surprised that even though the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group knew he was reporting for duty that day, when he arrived at the offices of the Fort Bragg Reception Company for in-processing, he discovered that he had no place to live. Somehow, the arrangements for his housing had slipped through the cracks.

_Fucking figures, _he thought with a scowl. _Welcome back to the U.S. Army._

It was a strange ending to a strange day that began with a flight from Dulles to Fayetteville Regional Airport aboard a commuter jet full of men and women bound for Fort Bragg, located fifteen miles to the northwest of the tiny airport. Booth spent the flight trying to ignore the unshakable feeling of strangeness that had been crackling through him for days.

It began the moment he walked into his neighborhood barber shop. The old-school establishment with its striped pole sat on a cozy if somewhat ramshackle street in the Adams Morgan section of northwest Washington. He'd been going to the same barber, Joe, ever since he moved to D.C. in 2002 to take a post as a Special Agent in the Violent Crimes Section of the FBI's field office. Joe had been with him the whole way as his career took off, and Booth had spent many Saturday mornings in Joe's chair, telling him about his work, his son, his Flyers and, of course, his amazing partner, Dr. Temperance Brennan.

Booth sat in his usual chair on the Saturday before his induction, grinning as Joe twirled him around so he was facing the mirror, and it was then—as he stared at his own face in the barber's mirror and saw himself with a civilian haircut that he knew he wouldn't wear again for a year—that the full weight of what he was about to do finally sank in.

He remembered the stunned, wide-eyed look on Joe's face when he asked for a high-and-tight (with the clippers set to #1 on the sides, no sideburns, and #3 on top) instead of the usual #2 on the sides and #7 on top. As soon as Joe finished, Booth's hand flew up and he rubbed the back of his head, where the clippers had left barely an eighth of an inch of hair.

Nothing—not the signing of his enlistment papers at the MEPS station, or the pre-enlistment medical exam, or even the bumpy flight from Dulles to Fayetteville—made his gut churn with the undeniable gravity of it all like it did when he felt the fuzz on the back of his head and realized that he didn't have enough hair left on top to rake his fingers through.

As the taxi wound its way from the south side of Fayetteville north to Fort Bragg, Booth found himself thinking of a similar day many years before when he passed through another sleepy southern town—Columbus, Georgia—on his way to another large Army installation. Booth spent most of his ten years in the Army at Fort Benning, where he attended Infantry School, Sniper School, Airborne ("jump") School, Ranger School and Pathfinder School, and where he was stationed while serving with the 75th Ranger Regiment. An eerie wave of déjà vu washed over him when the taxi drove past the sign at the entrance: "_Fort Bragg: Home of the Airborne and Special Operations Forces."_

His gut flip-flopped and he swallowed thickly as the sign slipped out of his peripheral vision. Glancing down at his hands, Booth rubbed his fingers over the dark blue denim of his Levi's and experienced a strange feeling of incipient nostalgia when he realized he would be pulling on a pair of digital camo trousers in the morning and virtually every morning thereafter for the next year. Dark dread settled over him as he cursed himself for letting it come to this.

A couple of hours later, after completing in-processing paperwork at the Reception Company building, Booth made his way to his temporary quarters and changed into the Army Combat Uniform which he'd secured before he left Washington so he would have something to wear upon arrival at Bragg. The uniform was brand new: the ripstop fabric felt crisp, almost crunchy, and his boots were immaculate, without a single scuff or snagged bootlace. He remembered how he had always hated the feeling of a brand new uniform, and how he used to wash and rewash and re-rewash the shit out of a new set of BDUs until they felt soft and lived-in like a pair of old pajamas.

But it wasn't just the crisp newness of the uniform that unsettled him.

This uniform was dramatically different than the one he wore the last time he stepped into camouflage trousers. Gone was the mottled four-color woodland pattern he wore in Kosovo and the jungles of Central America and Africa, the six-color sand and pebble motif he wore in Iraq in 1991, and the modified three-color desert camouflage he wore when he returned there on a covert mission in 1995. The new uniform was a digitized and supposedly more versatile scheme of gray, tan and sage green that the Army called the "Universal Camouflage Pattern." After seeing it up close for the first time, Booth couldn't help but roll his eyes, quickly deciding that the pattern was an equally stupid idea in any operational environment.

Most of the buttons he recalled from his old Army days had been replaced by zippers, elastic drawstrings and Velcro. _What dumb asshole decided that Velcro was a good idea on a combat uniform? _he wondered when he bought his ACUs from the base exchange at Fort Meade. _Obviously some paper-pushing moron at the Pentagon who's never actually been in fucking combat. _He grumbled as he realized that the 100% cotton fabric he'd favored in the past (the kind that got softer and more comfortable each time it was washed) had been replaced by a longer-lasting but less comfortable cotton-nylon blend.

He stood at the counter and muttered to himself about how much cheaper the old BDUs used to be than the new ACU as he forked over $650 for four combat uniforms and a pair of tan Gore-Tex combat boots. The cost of the new uniform shocked him. _At least the socks are better now, _he sighed as he watched the cashier package up his purchases and hoped that his annual uniform allowance would be paid in his first check.

The whole experience had been so surreal it seemed at the time as if it were all happening in slow-motion.

By the time Booth finished in-processing, changed into his uniform and stowed the rest of his things in his quarters, it was nearly six o'clock. His growling stomach stubbornly reminded him that all it had been fed that day was a couple of old-fashioned donuts at Dulles, and a package of cheese and crackers he'd bought out of a vending machine in the Reception Company building. Although he wasn't due to formally meet his new unit until 0700 the next morning, he was hopeful he'd find them at the dining facility (DFAC) nearest the complex of buildings that housed the 3rd Special Forces Group.

The niggling sense of déjà vu began to swirl again in the pit of his belly as he walked into the dining hall. He was struck at once by the bright white walls and row upon row of tables with mottled blue formica tabletops, each one full of men and women in fatigues, all of them talking and laughing, leaning over their trays and gesturing as the sound of a hundred conversations filled the room with a swelling warble of activity. It felt at once familiar and yet strangely alien to be there, a soldier again, surrounded by other soldiers. The fact that he didn't feel at home suddenly made Booth feel very far away from both who he was and who he was supposed to be.

The bright, institutional sterility of the whitewashed walls made him think of the last meal he shared with his partner at the diner and the sad, shimmering look in her gray-green eyes as they sat in their usual table in the corner. The memory made his chest ache and he wondered where she was and whether she felt as unsettled and out of place as he did. His stomach growled again and he couldn't help but smile to think how, had she been there with him, she would have made some sort of comment about his appetite and poor nutritional choices.

After filling his tray with a burger and fries, a Saran-wrapped bowl of chocolate pudding, and two cartons of whole milk, he made his way through the dining hall, his eyes carefully scanning the shoulder patches to find a table of Special Forces men. He saw a half-dozen different shoulder patches—the dragon insignia of the XVIII Airborne Corps, the double-A patch of the 82nd Airborne Division, the sword and lighting shield representing the Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, the red diamond-shaped rook insignia of the 20th Engineer Brigade and, he noted with narrow-eyed skepticism, the spear and star patch of the 16th Military Police Brigade—among the hundred-odd soldiers in the cafeteria. Finally, as he made his way to the far corner of the DFAC, his gaze settled on a table of men ranging in age from their early twenties through their late thirties whose patches identified them as Special Forces.

Grumbling at the change in the Army's uniform which made it impossible to discern a soldier's rank unless one could see the tiny Velcro rank patch affixed to the middle of his chest, Booth took a deep breath and approached the table.

"This seat taken?" he asked the master sergeant seated at the end of the group of seven. His eyes swept downwards and read the nametape, _Kennedy, _as he waited for a response. Kennedy raised his brows lazily and frowned as he gave Booth a slow once-over, then turned to another master sergeant across the table to his left and shrugged.

A first sergeant, a swarthy, hairy-knuckled Italian, grunted out a laugh and elbowed Kennedy in the arm, revealing his own nametape in the process. Huffing out a laugh, Bastone told him, "Don't be a fuck. Let him sit down."

Kennedy grunted, then moved his chair a few inches to make room for Booth, acknowledging him with scarcely more than a lazy-lidded look of disdain and a quick upward jerk of his chin before digging his fork into the plate of ziti in front of him.

The tips of Booth's ears burned hot as the table fell silent and seven pairs of eyes surveyed him, cataloguing him by noting the rank insignia in the middle of his chest, the Parachutist, Air Assault and Military Freefall qualification badges above the "U.S. ARMY" on his chest and above those, a Combat Infantryman Badge that signified he'd served in combat. He could feel their gazes on him as they read his shoulder patches: the "Screaming Eagle" insignia of the 101st Airborne that he wore on his right sleeve, and the "Ranger" and "Airborne" tabs he wore on his left between the spear-shaped patch of the Green Berets and the "Special Forces" qualification tab that proved he'd been through the same rigorous training they had.

He saw some of the furrowed brows around the table tick upwards as the men silently appraised him, but for several interminably long moments, no one spoke a word. Unwilling to let them see him unnerved, Booth cracked open one of his cartons of milk, took a swig, then took a bite of his cheeseburger, casually looking up from his tray to survey the group before taking another bite.

A minute passed before one of the men across the table from him finally looked up from his dinner tray and met Booth's eyes with his own. After a moment, the young, sandy-haired soldier gave a faint, knowing smile and said, "So you're the new NCOIC, huh?"

Booth couldn't help but laugh. In any other unit, the fact that he was a sergeant major with extensive training and substantial combat experience would have been enough to earn him deference from the other men in the unit. But here, among the Special Forces, none of that seemed to change the fact that he was a newcomer, an outsider and Johnny-come-lately foisted upon them by the brass at battalion headquarters to serve as their Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge.

At some level, Booth appreciated the raw honesty of it, and didn't mind having to prove himself to the men he would be spending the next year with. At another level, though, he couldn't help but wonder if he'd bitten off more than he could chew by jumping from civilian life back to serving with an elite unit like the Green Berets.

Pushing away the thought, he smiled vaguely at the young staff sergeant, Swann.

"Yup," he said, noting that several of their names were familiar to him from studying the company roster he received from the company commander after in-processing that afternoon. Not only had he stumbled on men from the 3rd Special Forces Group, but these were soldiers from the very same battalion and company to which he'd been assigned. A pleased grin split his face as he wondered if his luck was finally beginning to turn.

"What'd I tell ya?" Kennedy grumbled.

The other master sergeant, Parnell, snorted. "Retread," he said.

"A retread with a Freefall qualification," Bastone said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head at the two senior sergeants. "The closest either of you assholes ever got to military freefall is slipping off your bar-stools last weekend. If I was the sergeant major, I'd tell you douchebags to shut your pie-holes. He's the boss, though, so it's his call."

Booth smirked and saw Swann bite back a grin as his blue eyes swiveled among Bastone, Kennedy and Parnell.

Narrowing his own eye a little in what was almost a wink, Booth emptied his carton of milk in two swallows and clapped it down on his tray. Lazily glancing at the men to his left, he reached for a pair of French fries and dunked them into his ketchup, hesitating for a moment as he turned to Bastone, who held the same rank as Parnell but was clearly the de facto leader of the group. Booth could see the question welling up in the other man's gaze before he even opened his mouth.

"Ten years out and now you're back, huh?" Bastone asked, his words ringing with a thick Brooklyn accent as he arched a querying brow at his newly-anointed superior.

Booth grunted out a laugh. "Somebody's wife or girlfriend works in Human Resources Command, huh?" he retorted with an easy, confident grin. He let the comment hang in the air for a few moments as he gnawed on a fry, then flashed his brows at Swann. "Yeah," he admitted. "Ten in, ten out, and now I'm back."

Parnell crossed his arms and leaned over the table, his eyes hard and heavy-lidded with skepticism as he turned to glare at Booth. "Sure," he huffed. "How convenient, huh? Rolling back in now that things over there have been squared away by guys like us putting our balls on the line and trying not to get 'em shot off while civilian putzes like you were kickin' back in air-conditioned offices." He shook his head and rolled his eyes. "Where were you when your country needed you nine years ago?"

A tense silence settled over the group as they waited to see how their dark-eyed, dark-haired new sergeant major would respond to Parnell's bold challenge. After a second or two, Booth pushed his tray away from him and stared back at the cheeky, willful master sergeant with the raw, clipped South Boston accent.

"I was standing next to a bunch of New Jersey firefighters with blowtorches and circular saws watching 'em cut people out of what was left of the Twin Towers," he said grimly, his lower jaw shifting forward as the memory of those days sent a chill through him. "Sweating my balls off standing on a pile of smoldering rubble working twenty hours at a stretch, racing against the clock as we worked through the night, hoping with each passing hour that by some fucking miracle we'd find someone else left alive." He reached for his second carton of milk, suddenly realizing he'd lost his appetite as he cracked the cardboard open roughly and shook his head. "That's where I was. So, where were you?"

Parnell just sat there, wide-eyed with stunned surprise as the other six soldiers watched the pair.

The fair-eyed master sergeant drew a breath. "I, uhh…"

Booth shook his head and waved him off, took a large swig of milk and wiped the excess off his upper lip with the back of his hand. "Right," he grunted, choosing in that moment that it was best to appear a little aloof. He knew they were testing him and feeling him out, so with a vaguely sly grin he decided he'd return the favor, at least for the first few days. "See you boys at 0700," he said, standing up abruptly and rubbing the fuzz on the back of his head as he gave the seven men one last appraising look. "Later."

And with that, he picked up his tray, pushed his chair under the table with a shove of his knee and walked out.

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**A/N:** And that's how it begins. This collection, _Forgotten Memories, Remembered,_ is going to be a container of sorts for short sketches about moments that never made it into _Killing Two Birds. _I have no idea how many chapters there will be to this piece, or how frequently I will post them. Like my other collection, _Age of Discovery, _ideas will pop up, I will write them, and I will post them. Assuming, that is, that people are interested. Let me know what you thought of this first chapter and what you think of the idea as a whole. Consider leaving a review.

**Acknowledgements:** Props and effusive gratitude to **FauxMaven** for being a beta-reader for this chapter.


	2. The First Night in Helmand

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

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**Chapter 2: The First Night in Helmand**

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Booth's head throbbed and his whole body ached as he walked into the barracks with heavy, almost clumsy steps. He was exhausted—utterly and completely wiped. Even though it had only been twenty-some hours, it seemed like days since he last slept. He couldn't remember the last time he felt so tired.

It might have been as far back as when his son Parker was an infant and he kept him for a long weekend when Rebecca went out of town for an uncle's funeral. Parker's colic turned a quiet weekend with his baby son into a miserable marathon of angry, ear-piercing crying that nothing Booth tried could soothe or console. _Did I sleep at all that weekend? _he asked himself as he surveyed the available beds in the barracks hut. He was so dazed with exhaustion, he couldn't remember.

Too tired to stand or even to think, he finally gave in to the demands of his heavy, aching limbs as he collapsed onto his chosen bunk.

It had been a long day—or, rather, a long two days.

By the time the twelve men of Operational Detachment-Alpha 3623 arrived at the forward operating base in Qūryah, they had been traveling for more than thirty-six hours. Their journey began at Pope Air Field at Fort Bragg, where they boarded a C-17 that shuttled them to Ramstein, Germany and then on to Incirlik, Turkey and finally to Kandahar Airbase. Once in Kandahar, they transferred to a pair of Chinook helicopters that ferried them, their gear and a load of fresh supplies to their small outpost on the edge of a farming community in the Helmand River basin.

Alpha 3623 replaced another twelve-man detachment from the 3rd Special Forces group that had been training Afghan National Army troops. Their short-term objective was to prepare the Afghan soldiers to reinforce a massive joint NATO/Afghan campaign that was underway to pacify the area around the Taliban stronghold of Marjah some forty-two kilometers to the northwest.

Their outpost, Forward Operating Base Maddox, was named for Sergeant First Class James Maddox, a member of the 3rd Special Forces Group's 2nd Battalion who was killed by an IED in 2005 near Kandahar. The FOB was little more than a tight cluster of quickly-assembled pre-fabricated barracks, supply buildings, mess tent and a dozen Humvees. The modest complex was hemmed in by a barbed wire-trimmed wall of earth-filled bastions with a pair of sandbagged guard towers, one on each end of the base. The men of Alpha 3623 shared the base with another A-team and with the two companies of ANA troops the Green Berets were in charge of training.

_Welcome to Hell's armpit_, Booth thought grimly as he stood in front of 3623's barracks and watched the two Chinooks take flight. Their bulbous shapes and twin rotors formed a shrinking silhouette against the orange glow of the setting sun as they disappeared over the horizon. _Population: 238._

The nearest NATO installation to FOB Maddox was Camp Davis, a base and airfield located six kilometers away. The larger facility served as the local base of operations for the 7th Marine Regiment. The Marine encampment was better fortified and equipped with luxuries such as paved roads, a TV lounge and a weight room. The soldiers of FOB Maddox depended on the Marine base for certain services since it included a number of support functions, like a field hospital and a vehicle maintenance facility, that FOB Maddox was simply too small to maintain for itself.

The men at FOB Maddox considered themselves the tip of the spear and took a certain amount of pride in their spartan existence. The Green Berets had been sent to Afghanistan to teach the Afghans how to fight, and to fight alongside them as they learned and made this war their own. At many of the other U.S. military camps and installations in Afghanistan, both enlisted men and officers had private, albeit small, living spaces. At FOB Maddox, Booth and the Green Berets would live like their Afghan comrades: housed in open barracks, with the officers, Booth and the three E-8s in one hut, and the other six men in the other.

Booth was so drained after the 36-hour trip from Fort Bragg that he didn't even bother unpacking. He let his overstuffed top-cinched duffel bag slide off his shoulder and drop to the floor, coming to rest against the wall next to his bed beside his tactical "go" pack. Plunking himself down on the thin mattress, he leaned over and untied his bootlaces with tired, impatient jerks.

His eyes fell on the dog tags he'd threaded his bootlaces through, one on each boot, just above the lower-most eyelets:

_BOOTH_  
_SEELEY J._  
_159-47-8357_  
_O-POSITIVE_  
_CATHOLIC _

The father of a childhood friend once told him how he'd threaded his dog tags into his boot laces while he was serving in Vietnam, to help make sure that all of him made it home in case a land mine or mortar tore him apart while out on patrol.

After almost nine years of military intervention in Afghanistan, American soldiers and Marines were still losing their lives to IEDs every month. Sobering practicality made Booth direct every one of the enlisted soldiers in Alpha 3623 to get an extra pair of dog tags made and thread them through their bootlaces, just in case. _"If one of us doesn't make it back from there alive," _he told them in a team meeting one morning before a training exercise, "_I want to make damn sure that all of you, or all of me, makes it back home." _The nine enlisted soldiers of Alpha 3623 nodded, their faces stony and their eyes hard as they sat quietly in their chairs. Death was an ever-present threat, and yet something the men seldom spoke of, almost as if the mere mention of death was a jinx to be avoided. Although Booth violated one of the infantry's fundamental taboos, the men had developed a certain respect for him in the weeks since his arrival. They knew he took seriously the motto, _"Leave no man behind."_

Booth remembered the curious boost of confidence that surged through him when, in a moving and somewhat grim gesture of _esprit de corps_, the unit's commander and assistant commander, Captain Torres and Warrant Officer Sivick, followed suit and showed up to the team meeting the following morning with dog tags laced into their own boots.

Shaking off the thought, Booth yanked his boots off one at a time and groaned with relief as he wiggled his toes. The drab tan color of his sweat-soaked socks made him frown and wonder when he'd next be able to wear the colorful striped socks he loved to wear in civilian life as a silent symbol of his roguish individuality. With a heavy sigh, he peeled off his socks, leaving them where they fell at the side of his bed as he unzipped his uniform shirt and tossed it on top of his duffel. _Tomorrow,_ he told himself. _I'll get things squared away. But not tonight. Not tonight._

Propping his pillow behind him, he sat on his bed and leaned his head back, bumping the wall with a _clunk _as Bastone, Kennedy and Parnell divided up the remaining three bunks. Booth and the two officers pulled rank and taken first dibs on the beds at the back of the barracks. He watched with one heavy-lidded eye as Bastone picked the bunk to his right, nearest the door, leaving the two E-8s from Boston to decide which one of them would sleep next to their detachment commander, Captain Torres.

Too tired to hazard even the briefest conversation with Bastone, who in just three weeks had become a friend as well as his right hand man, Booth closed his eyes and sighed as he adjusted the pillow and laid down. His body sank into the thin, cheap mattress like lead as he stretched out his legs. It annoyed him how stiff his joints were after two days on three long-haul flights and a loud, bumpy ride in a jump seat in the back of a Chinook helicopter. The voice inside his head admonished him to take off his uniform trousers and sleep only in his skivvies, but he felt too damn tired to even bother.

He rolled over onto his side, turning his back to Sivick as he reached into the cargo pocket of his trousers and fished out his iPod. He pulled up his photos and touched his finger to a picture of his son, his wavy blond locks hanging over his forehead in crazy disarray as he stood next to Brennan, whose mouth was curved in a faint smile as if she were trying to remain stolid and professional. They were in the lab, leaning over a stainless-steel table with a tray of foot bones in front of them. He had caught them by surprise that afternoon, arriving earlier than usual to pick his son up from the Jeffersonian's after-school enrichment program, and the photograph captured both of them with a happy brightness in their eyes.

Booth felt a warmth spread through his chest but it quickly faded to a dull ache at the thought that it would be six months, maybe more before he could see his son on his mid-tour leave, and a whole year before he saw Brennan again. He pressed the lock button and watched the image vanish into black, then slid the device back into his thigh pocket as he crossed his arms in front of his chest and sighed.

He met Bastone's gaze for a couple of seconds, just long enough to see his friend's brown eyes narrow a little as a smirk curved the edges of his lips. The first sergeant rubbed his dry, weary eyes and peeled back the covers on his crisply-made bunk, sliding his legs between the sheets as he studied Booth, who lay on top of his still-made bed, barefoot and half-dressed. Both of them looked up as Master Sergeant Kennedy turned off the lights.

Something about being in the dark gave Booth the necessary mental nudge to roll over on his back with a grunt, unfasten his web belt and unbutton his fly before slowly shoving his fatigues down his thighs and kicking them quietly off the side of the bed. He frowned as he heard the _clunk_ against the floor as he realized his iPod was still in the pocket of his pants. Too tired to do anything about it, he peeled the covers back and slipped between the sheets, wincing as he stretched his legs and wiggled his toes, sending a dull throb of pain along the arches of his feet to his heels. He'd just pulled the sheet snugly over his shoulders when Bastone's low voice broke the silence that had quietly settled over the barracks.

"Need me to read you a bedtime story, Booth?" he asked, his gravelly voice barely louder than a whisper. "Because if you do—"

Booth rolled his eyes in the darkness. "Fuck you, Bastone." Someone on the other side of the barracks laughed.

"Fuck you, too, Booth," Baston snapped back with a snicker. After a beat, he grumbled, "You better not snore."

"Maybe," Booth replied,"but not as loud as Swann says _you_ do."

"Sounds like me and Swann need to have a talk," Bastone murmured, then drew a breath and said, "Goodnight, Booth."

Booth shifted in his bunk, frowning at the way the bed squeaked as he moved.

"Goodnight, you fuckin' putz," he said, grinning to himself in the darkness.

The last thing Booth heard before succumbing to the heavy pull of sleep was another snorting laugh from the other side of the barracks.

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**A/N: **_And so we have one more memory to help fill in the picture of what happened to Booth over there. Personally, I've always wanted to know more about what Booth went through in Afghanistan, because we know those experiences changed him. As is often the case in (if not the very purpose of) fan fiction, I have taken it upon myself to explore this largely-uncharted space. _

_I hope you find these sketches of value. While my purpose is to describe what happened to Booth in Afghanistan in the six months before I veered way off the canonical path in _Killing Two Birds,_ it is my goal to be faithful to what those weeks and months might have been like for Booth even in the canonical universe. In either case, I would love to know what you think. Please, share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Consider leaving a review._

_Thanks for reading!_

**Editorial note:** _Once again, effusive thanks to_ **FauxMaven** _for her invaluable assistance as my beta reader for these moments of gritty Boothiness. _


	3. A Better Offer

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

* * *

**Chapter 3: A Better Offer**

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The seven of them sat around a table in the back corner of the bar. The tabletop was a crowded mess of glasses and bottles of beer in various states of consumption along with a half-dozen empties. Columns of smoke spiraled in slow-motion above three ashtrays and four smoldering cigarettes, two of which belonged to First Sergeant Lou Bastone, who had forgotten that he already had one burning away when he lit a second one.

"Can't believe you drink that crap," Parnell declared, holding his bottle of Sam Adams with three fingers as he pointed emphatically in Booth's direction. "Pabst Blue Ribbon tastes like ass."

Booth cocked a brow at the remark and took a slow, deliberative sip of beer as he waved off Bastone's offer of a cigarette. Setting his glass down on the table with a loud clank, he closed one eye and narrowed the other as he studied Parnell for a moment.

"I guess I'll take your word for it," he said with a smirk. "You being an expert on what ass tastes like and all."

The whole group roared with laughter and Bastone snorted out a sharp stream of smoke as he slapped the table. Hackett covered his nose and mouth with his fist, as if trying to keep his own beer from squirting out of his nose as he snickered.

Parnell tilted back his beer and took a long sip, holding it in his mouth for a moment as he gave Booth the middle finger before swallowing. Booth acknowledged the gesture with an upward jerk of his chin and a quick waggle of his brows.

"Wait, where's Dawson?" Swann asked from the end of the table once the laughter died down. "I thought he told us he was comin' tonight."

From the other end of the table, Lukas glanced into his near-empty bottle of Budweiser, then looked up with a crooked grin.

"Oh, something came up at the last minute," he said, his hazel eyes alight with a hint of silent laughter that Booth immediately recognized as a sign that the sergeant first class was in possession of a juicy morsel of secret knowledge.

"That fucker," Hackett spat, raising his chin as he looked around for the barmaid, Clarissa. "He was supposed to buy my first two rounds tonight since I kicked his ass the other night playing cards. Four hands in a row. That little shit—"

Booth leaned back and rubbed his hand over the short, prickly hair on the back of his head as he studied the two sergeants with amused curiosity.

He'd spent much of his time at Bragg watching and listening to the men in the detachment, cataloguing not just their skills but also their personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. Of the twelve men in Alpha 3623, eight of them had served together on a prior combat tour, but four of them—Sergeants First Class Dawson and Hornby, Captain Torres, and Booth himself—were new to the team.

The night before, he sat on the floor in front of the coffee table in his sparsely-furnished apartment on the northeast edge of the base with nine file folders fanned out in front of him. He spent the evening reading each enlisted man's service record, trying to familiarize himself with each man's experience, specialized training and skill sets: explosives and combat engineering, battlefield medicine, precision marksmanship, and so on. Booth sat down the next morning with Bastone and the two officers to split the twelve-man detachment into two six-man "sticks" used for helicopter movements. However, since it was unlikely the unit would be involved in very many air assault missions, they further subdivided the group into three four-man fireteams. The fireteam structure was more versatile than sticks and could be used for foot patrols and instructional activities, with each foursome responsible for a thirty-two man Afghan infantry platoon. Lastly, they assigned each man a "battle-buddy" from his stick, ensuring that each man had someone looking after him, both inside and outside of "the wire." Older, more senior soldiers were paired with younger, less experienced men to foster mentoring relationships and overall unit cohesion. Booth, the oldest member of the unit, was paired with Staff Sergeant Swann, who at age twenty-two was the youngest member of Alpha 3623.

Booth left the meeting that morning feeling good about the Alpha and, for the first time since joining the detachment three weeks earlier, about his ability to contribute to the team as a leader. Smiling faintly as he listened to his younger comrades banter, Booth nodded to himself and concluded that these men were, without a doubt, the best he'd ever served with.

He was shaken from his daze when Clarissa placed a fresh pint of beer in front of him and plucked his glass from the table mere moments after he'd emptied it. He glanced over at Lukas, who twirled his bottle in a lazy circle, swishing around the remaining swallow's worth of his beer for a moment before pursing his lips and slowly looking up again.

The young sergeant briefly met Booth's narrowed gaze, shrugged and said, "Yeah, I think he got a better offer."

Struggling to hide his grin, Booth brought his glass to his lips, swiveling his eyes from Lukas to Hackett as he quietly slurped the first foamy sip of his beer.

Hackett's bushy blond brows furrowed under the brim of his faded maroon Sun Devils baseball cap. "A better offer?" he groused, tipping back his Coors to capture the last flat sip and scowling as he set his bottle down with a petulant clank. "Sure...he just finked out when he found out he—"

"His wife's ovulating," Lukas deadpanned, biting the inside of his lip as his mouth curved with a smug, conspiratorial smirk.

The crowd around the table laughed again, leaving the red-faced Arizonan sitting there with a sheepish grin and an empty beer.

"They've been tryin' for another kid for about a year now," Lukas explained, the teasing edge of his voice softening as he spoke. "She texted him while we were at the firing range and said 'tonight's the night.' So, yeah, I'd say he got a better offer."

"Fucker," Hackett grumbled in half-hearted annoyance. "He pulled out knowin' it'll be a friggin' year before I can collect on our bet."

After a moment, the laughter around the table again faded to a couple of isolated snickers. Booth raised his glass with an arched brow and a playful twinkle in his brown eyes.

"Yeah," he said. "Except I don't think Dawson's pullin' outta anything tonight."

* * *

**A/N: **_Lest you think all of Booth's memories of his time in the Army were negative, I thought it was important to see another side of that experience. This one was short, but hopefully still worth the read. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Take a moment to leave a review or, if you want, zing me a note on Twitter (username "**_dharmamonkey**" - don't forget the all-important underscore at the beginning). In either case, thanks for reading._

**Editorial note: **_Another grateful shout-out to _**FauxMaven **_for taking the time to beta these chapters for me. _


	4. A Hot Mess

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**Chapter 4: A Hot Mess**

* * *

The warm afternoon sun bore down hard on their shoulders as they walked. They wore Kevlar helmets and an extensive arrangement of body armor that left their reddening faces and the napes of their necks among the few patches of skin left exposed.

Booth and Parnell were walking in the middle of the patrol group, with four Afghan trainees in front of them, and six behind them—along with Swann and Hackett, who also doubled as the patrol's rearguard.

Booth thought Parnell looked a little twitchy judging by the way he was moving on patrol. He seemed more uncomfortable in his body armor than usual, and a quick glance up at the unusually warm afternoon sun left little doubt as to the reason why.

Parnell cleared his throat and pulled his M4 carbine snug against his chest as he walked, rolling his shoulders back one at a time and frowning a little at the sound of the friction the weapon made against the front of his tactical vest. The vest was fitted with boron carbide ceramic plates on the front, back and sides to protect against small-arms fire and shrapnel, and weighed more than thirty pounds. It was made even heavier by extensions covering the groin, shoulders, upper arms and lower back, plus extra clips of ammunition, a canteen and other equipment strapped to the lower part of the vest.

Sensing that Booth had been watching him, Parnell cocked a brow and shot him a smirking look. "Maybe I spoke too soon," he said with a snicker.

"Huh?"

The comment caught Booth by surprise. His attention had been focused on the four Afghan National Army trainees walking point on the patrol and on the way their heads, eyes and weapons swept across the half-shadowed backstreet as their boots crunched against the sandy ground. Booth's dark brows furrowed hard over his eyes as he turned to the master sergeant with a slight scowl.

"About what?" he grunted, his suspicion immediately roused by Parnell's snicker.

Parnell glanced down the alley to their left, narrowing his eyes as he watched a stray cat root around in a pile of trash about fifteen feet away, then nodded to himself and turned to Booth with a grin. "You know, hmmm?" he said, reaching up with his free left hand and stroking his fingertips over the half-inch long dirty-blond beard on his chin. "Your age is showing there, Booth."

"Hmmph," Booth replied, fingering the side of his rifle's action, just above the trigger, as he reached up and rubbed his knuckles on the underside of his chin.

The Green Berets of Alpha 3623 had begun letting their beards grow out as soon as they arrived in-country. Wearing beards had helped Special Forces teams earn the respect of the Afghan National Army troops and local Afghan tribesmen whose Pashtun culture regarded facial hair as the mark of manliness. Booth frowned as he felt the scruff, knowing as he felt the prickle of his beard that there was a lot of gray on his chin. His fingers migrated up to the side of his jaw where he scratched the scraggly, uneven growth there. It irked him that the seemingly simple task of growing a beard was the one thing he was particularly ill-equipped to do, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. It had always been that way, going all the way back to his mid-teens: his beard grew quickly (annoyingly so, such that he usually shaved in the evening before a date, just in case) but never really filled in on the sides.

He remembered what Bastone told him the night before _("You're gonna finish this tour with the worst, sorriest-ass looking beard in the whole fuckin' 3rd Special Forces Group") _and his now customary retort to his friend's badgering_ ("Fuck you, Bastone")_. He gave his scruffy jaw another scratch before bringing his hand back to the weapon's stock, wiggling his fingers as he felt the dust in the webbing between them and wondered if he should break down and wear tactical gloves like the other guys did.

"You should respect your elders, Master Sergeant," he told Parnell, hitching his rifle strap more snugly over his shoulder as he tried to ignore the bead of sweat that was dribbling down the back of his neck. "Every one of these gray hairs represents experience."

The Irish sergeant's blue eyes flashed bright with laughter as his mouth curved into a smirk. "Most guys put just notches in their bedposts, you know."

Booth's eyes rolled hard as he shook his head. "Not _that_ kind of experience, you fucking douche. Get your head out of the gutter."

He paused, his brow knitting as he saw the Afghan troops slow their pace and hesitate at the end of a block. The four of them stopped and formed a huddle, conferring about something as they stood there in a tight bunch that made Booth nervous because it presented an attractive target for insurgent attack.

He couldn't help but wonder if the task with which he and his men were charged—to transform a ragtag herd of Afghan farmers into a skilled, self-sustaining fighting force capable of keeping Taliban extremists and their Al-Qaeda allies out of their country—wasn't really a fool's errand after all.

He watched them standing there in their old-style, four-color U.S. Army surplus camouflage jackets, olive-drab trousers and green Kevlar helmets without the fabric helmet cover Booth and his comrades wore, shaking his head at how their mismatched uniforms was a perfect metaphor for the slapdash manner in which the ANA itself was cobbled together. It didn't help that Alpha 3623 and the ANA company they had been training were summoned to reinforce coalition forces in Marjah not three weeks after the Green Berets arrived in Qūryah to take over the training duties from their predecessors in Charlie Company.

While Booth found the ANAs to be brave and unafraid of either fighting or hard work, he worried that their indigenous commanders, the lieutenants who led the company's platoons, were inexperienced, unfocused and ill-equipped to command heterogenous units comprised of men from various tribes and provinces across Afghanistan. The looseness with which the Afghan lieutenants led their ragtag platoons worried Booth more than anything else, and he puzzled over how to help the ANA unit leaders consolidate their commands.

With a frustrated sigh, Booth shrugged off the thought as he saw the ANAs ahead of him break up their huddle and continue on to the next block of mud-brick buildings as they made their way towards one of Marjah's largest markets.

He scowled as another bead of sweat dribbled down his temple and caught on the edge of his burgeoning beard, which only made the scruff feel even itchier than it did before. Raising his arm, he scratched at his jaw and grunted as he glanced down the alley to his left. "If it's this warm in fuckin' April," Booth groused, his eyes swiveling over to watch Parnell survey the street ahead, "then how fuckin' miserable is it gonna be when we actually hit summer?"

He could see Parnell's forehead crease as his brows flew up at the question. "Are you fuckin' kiddin' me?" he asked. "This place blows in the summer. You get it all here—cold as shit in the winter, hot as fuck in the summer. And no chance of a six-pack to cool ya down, either. What I'd do for a nice cold one at Miller Time..."

Booth simply sighed and wiped another annoying drip of sweat off the back of his neck, drying his fingers on the dusty thigh of his trousers and realizing all he'd managed to do in the process was make a smear of sweat-mud on his fingers.

"Gloves," Parnell said with a faint smile. "You should try 'em."

The ANAs hesitated again, driving the heavy mantel of Booth's brow to slope low over his dark eyes. "Get up there and find out what the fuck the problem is, huh?" he said, indicating with a quick jerk of his chin for Parnell to move up and check on the Afghans. "What a fuckin' mess," he muttered to himself as he watched the tall, long-legged master sergeant jog up the block. "A hot _fuckin' _mess."

He wiped his sweat-dotted forehead with his hand, not caring anymore whether he was smearing dust on himself in the process. Disengaging his rifle's safety with a flick of his finger, he rubbed his prickly chin with the back of his hand, glanced over his shoulder and whistled to Swann and Hackett, gesturing for them to bring their men forward, then began to make his way towards Parnell and the Afghans at the end of the block.

As he listened to the hard crunch of rock-strewn sand beneath his boots, he couldn't help but wonder why the hell he allowed that Colonel Pelant to talk him into reenlisting.

"Fuckin' A."

* * *

**A/N: **_I love soldier banter, don't you? _

_Even though these sketches are set in the "universe" of characters and places I used for my story "Killing Two Birds," I believe they are plausible even in the canonical context, since the show has told us very little about what happened to Booth in Afghanistan (especially before H.B. came along). Oh, and __the beard thing? If Booth was a Special Forces soldier deployed to Afghanistan in early/mid 2010, he almost certainly would have grown a beard, because that's what the Green Berets did. (Don't believe me? Look it up.) So, for some of his time in the 'Stan, soldier!Booth would have been a very scruffy Booth._

___In any event, I hope you're enjoying these little sketches of Booth's life in the Army (2010 edition). Let me know what you think of these pieces, and if they're of any value to you. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Consider leaving a review._

**Editorial note: **_Yet another round of effusive praise for the generous efforts of _**FauxMaven**_, who ruthlessly roots out redundancies and run-ons as she helps me tighten these little pieces._


	5. Preparation

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**Chapter 5: Preparation**

* * *

It was late in the afternoon when Bastone found him in the Alpha Company office, leaning back in his chair with feet propped on the edge of his desk.

"Am I interrupting something?" Bastone asked as he took a seat in the chair in front of Booth's desk. He leaned forward, swiping a finger through a thin layer of dust on the edge of the In/Out mail-tray, and then rubbed his forefingers together as he cocked an eyebrow and watched Booth expectantly.

Booth looked up from the spiral-bound document he was reading and pursed his lips sheepishly before dropping his legs back to the floor. He set his reading materials aside and with a quiet sigh swung his chair around to face Bastone. He ruffled the short hair on the top of his head, indulging what had become a habit of his since getting his hair shorn the weekend before he reported to the MEPS station in Baltimore for induction.

"What's up?" he asked Bastone, then with a faintly-awkward grin added, "I, uhh, was trying to catch up on some of these intel reports on that sector of Helmand."

Bastone shook his head and chuckled. "It's not worth the effort," he said. "Half that shit's gonna be out of date and inaccurate before our boots even hit the ground. So don't give yourself an aneurysm trying to get through it all. Trust me."

Booth laughed and reached for his styrofoam cup of now-cold coffee. "Yeah," he said with a shrug. "I hear ya, but I still want to be as prepared as I can, you know? I owe it to the guys in the detachment to—"

As the Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge, Booth had only direct report—Bastone—to whom the rest of the enlisted men in the detachment reported. Bastone grimaced and dismissed Booth's concern with a casual wave of his hand. "That's not why you're here," he said, tilting his own styrofoam coffee cup and staring into it for a moment as he let his words hang in the air between them. Booth's eyes narrowed as Bastone set his coffee down with a soft plunk and cracked his knuckles, finger by gnarled finger.

"What?"

"They didn't bring you back to read month-old intel reports," Bastone explained, hushing his voice so that the other two sergeants on the opposite side of the office couldn't hear him. "Parnell can shoot off his big-ass Boston mouth all he wants, and probably fucking will, but the reality is, you've seen all kinds of shit in all kinds of places, both in the Army and elsewhere and, well, there aren't a lot of a guys left in the Army like you. My guess is that's why they asked you back."

Unable to hide the flicker of pride in his eyes, Booth straightened his posture but said nothing as he leaned back in his chair and listened.

"I know you've been in the shit," Bastone continued, "Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and a fuckton other places I'm sure. We know you know shit—Jump School, Ranger School, Sniper School, SWCS—but fact is, that doesn't impress these guys. There's a zillion guys who go through Ranger School to tick the box and get their tab who go ahead and spend the rest of their careers behind a desk in the rear with the gear. Not you, though. You've actually seen shit first-hand." The dark-eyed New Yorker rubbed the faint shadow of stubble on his chin and lazily took another sip of his coffee. "The guys know it," he said. "They can see it in your eyes."

Booth's brow furrowed as he puzzled over what the first sergeant was getting at.

"Besides …" Bastone hesitated for a moment, quickly reading Booth's eyes before moving to his next point. "We see a lot of guys roll through here with Bronze Stars—brass, especially, who seem to earn one just for being able to properly tie their bootlaces and wipe their asses during a deployment—but yours is for _valor. _That shit carries weight, even with big-mouthed, smart-ass micks like Parnell and Kennedy."

Seeing Booth's eyes darken at the reference to his medal, Bastone quickly moved to reassure him. "The rest of your record was classified," he said, "so my friend of a friend in Human Resources Command didn't have a chance to do a look-see. But, the fact that he couldn't see means you've been places and done things...a lot of things."

There was a code among men like them—an unwritten rule that no soldier asked another soldier about how a medal was earned. The rule was born of a solemn understanding that medals are given for deeds done and decisions made amid the kind of chaos and suffering that the wearers of such medals prefer not to be reminded of.

"I know that," Bastone said quietly.

Booth's jaw shifted as he mentally thumbed through the litany of other places he'd been deployed, either as covert operator or military advisor: Rwanda, Guatemala, Zaire, Tunisia, El Salvador, the Congo, the Philippines, Angola, Sierra Leone, Algeria, Nepal...

Many of the missions he carried out during his time in the Rangers involved classified operations for which neither he nor the other participants received combat stars on their Parachutist or Combat Infantryman badges even though the places they fought were "hot" by any soldier's standard. As far as the official record was concerned, those missions never happened. His sacrifices were made largely in silence, and for the most part, that never bothered him. Now that he was back in the Army and assigned to a tightly-knit unit of highly-skilled, experienced covert fighters, Booth wondered if the classified, undocumented nature of his military service might be a handicap as he tried to prove he was worthy of serving alongside them.

He swallowed hard and sighed a little in quiet frustration, then smiled when he saw an enigmatic but vaguely playful glint appear in Bastone's eye.

"So you looked me up, huh?" he asked.

Bastone smirked and shrugged with feigned innocence, then laughed. "Come on," he said with a roll of his eyes. "You know as well as I do that old tomcats like us don't live this long or earn these stripes without learning how to find out things and get a hold of stuff that the system doesn't want us to."

"True," Booth admitted.

Bastone glared into his cup, pouting as he saw there wasn't enough left for even a single sip, then turned and lazily tossed it into the trashcan next to a neighboring desk.

Booth nibbled the inside of his lower lip as he studied his subordinate, knowing that he had just a couple of weeks until they deployed to Afghanistan's restive Helmand Province. Before they left, he needed to identify the strongest leaders and most versatile soldiers among the men under his command. Bastone, the intelligence/operations sergeant of the detachment, was the de-facto head of the unit, the man to whom all of the other enlisted men looked for guidance and leadership when the going got tough. It surprised Booth a little that Bastone himself wasn't promoted to the NCOIC position—and even more so that once he was installed as the NCOIC above Bastone, the first sergeant seemed to harbor no resentment over the fact that he'd been passed over for the post.

Booth knew he had been fortunate, because he'd expected to encounter issues after being assigned to an existing Special Forces detachment. The Army enticed him into reenlisting by promising him a promotion from Master Sergeant to Sergeant Major, normally a company- or battalion-level position where his role would be mostly administrative. But if Booth knew anything, he knew himself, and he was no better suited to push paper in the Army than he was at the FBI. So, as a condition of accepting the Army's offer, he demanded an assignment to an Operational Detachment-Alpha where he would be "boots on the ground." He wanted to lead men in the field, to be directly involved in the mission, and to be able to keep men safe by keeping them sharp.

He knew it wouldn't be easy, and that he would have to earn their trust before they would follow him.

"You're a retread," Bastone said with a sly grin, using Army slang for a reenlistee—a soldier who leaves the Army but later reenlists because he's disappointed by civilian life. "But you're not the usual, garden-variety retread," he explained. "You were a helluva soldier. You left the Army and did awesome things, and got asked to come back, which is pretty fuckin' high praise because the Green Machine doesn't usually send out engraved invitations to reel in forty-year old ground-pounding trigger-pullers."

"Thirty-nine," Booth corrected him. "Not forty."

Bastone rolled his eyes. "Whatever," he snorted. "Point is, I know you're bringing things to this team that we didn't have before. The younger guys know it. Kennedy and Parnell are hard-cases, but deep down, they know it, too. They're good guys, but stubborn pains in the asses, both of 'em. They're that way about everything, especially new guys and definitely about new leadership. They were that way when I came over from 2nd Battalion. They'll come around. I think they just need a little bit of practical demonstration before something will sink into their thick Boston skulls. Wouldn't be the first time."

Booth nodded. Intellectually, he knew he was a good soldier—hell, a great soldier, if he were being honest with himself—and he knew he could lead. But as he sat behind an empty desk in an uncomfortably crisp new set of fatigues, he still felt out of place and out of practice leading men like these in circumstances like this.

Bastone stood up, brushing his hands on his thighs as if merely being in the vicinity of a dusty desk had soiled him. "Come on," he said. "Put that crap down and let's go."

His brow knitting low over his narrowed eyes, Booth's lip curled in confusion. "What?" he coughed. "Where am I going?" He pulled up his sleeve and glanced at his watch. "Wait, it's not even—"

"I told Parnell we'd be at his place by 17:30," he explained with a sly grin. "If he lights those coals on the Weber and they get too cool because you dilly-dallied here, you won't have to worry about him because _I'm_ gonna kick your ass." He made a circular motion in the air with his hand. "Come on, Sergeant Major," he said, snapping his fingers impatiently. "We got a couple New York strips with our names on 'em and fuckin' hell's gonna freeze over before I let those steaks get ruined because we didn't sear 'em while the coals were still hot. So let's scoot."

"Alright, okay," Booth said with a smile, standing up and, giving the intel reports one last fleeting glance, in just a couple of strides caught up with the shorter-legged first sergeant. When they reached the door, Booth turned around and, realizing that everyone else had left, turned off the light and closed the door behind them with an authoritative clunk. "Hey," he said, placing his hand on Bastone's shoulder. "Thanks, I—"

Bastone met his gaze and shrugged. "Don't mention it," he said. "Let's go. Those New York strips are calling our names."

"Lead the way, First Sergeant," Booth said with a toothy smile. "Lead the way."

* * *

**A/N:** _I love Booth and Bastone, don't you? :-) One of my greatest frustrations with the show is that Booth never really had friends (at least, not until Aldo came arond). So in my fanfic world, Booth gets friends. Guy friends. Pals. Buddies. Brothers in arms._

_I know there are a lot of people reading these who are quietly lurking. It's okay. I lurk, too. But it would be wonderful if a few of you lurkers would consider de-lurking and letting me know what you think of these little stories of soldier Booth and his band of merry men. Come on. I won't bite. Some of my favorite people are former lurkers who emerged from the shadows :-) Drop me a line. Share your thoughts. Don't read and run._

_Next one of these is going to be quite a bit angstier. It will post from afar, since I'll be traveling in Sweden and Ireland for the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned...and in the meantime, thanks for reading!_

**Editorial note: **_Thanks again to _**FauxMaven**_ for offering her services as a beta-reader/guinea pig for this project. _


	6. Friendlies Down

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**Chapter 6: Friendlies Down**

* * *

Booth heard him coming but didn't turn around.

The rifle's bipod rested firmly on top of one of the sandbags that formed a protective barrier outside the guard tower's particle board walls. Booth sat behind the scope with a motionless patience and steady breath in what the men called his "sniper mode." He imagined himself a living, breathing lens, positioned in the tower as the silent, watchful eye surveying the full expanse of his domain. He allowed his focus to broaden into a calm, open alertness as he took in the rich, green fields located just a few hundred meters beyond the razor-wired walls of FOB Crossbow.

He'd been sitting for nearly an hour when his zen-like state was broken by the heavy sounds of boots on the tower's metal ladder. Grunting softly in irritation, he refocused his mind, keeping his finger flush against the side of the rifle's action, just above the trigger. He again let his gaze melt into a wide and unfixed awareness as he kept a watchful eye over the irrigated fields criss-crossed with shallow canals.

"You're out of uniform, Sergeant Major," he heard Bastone say as his boots fell one by one on the dusty plywood floor of the guard tower.

Booth blinked at the interruption but didn't turn around. "Uh-huh," he said, reaching up with his left hand to wipe the sweat off the back of his neck. For hours the temperature in Marjah had hovered well above the century mark, and the usual afternoon breeze gave no respite from the heat that August day. Beads of sweat dribbled down the inside of his arms before halting where his snug-fitting tactical gloves hugged his wrists like a second skin.

Booth had stumbled in from the day's patrol, shed his helmet and uniform jacket, put his armored vest back on over his sweat-wicking T-shirt, grabbed his crumpled patrol cap, slung his rifle over his shoulder and set off for the guard tower, gruffly relieving the Afghan soldier on duty.

"I don't blame you," Bastone said with a shrug as he unslung his own rifle and leaned it against the wall of the tower. He took his place behind the Mark 48 7.62mm light machine gun next to Booth. "It's fucking hot as shit today," he observed.

"_Mmmph_." Booth shifted slightly in his seat and offered nothing more than a grunt in reply. Bastone glanced over at his friend, whose jutting jaw and flared nostrils hinted at the emotion hidden behind the rosy-hued mirror of his wrap-around Oakley sunglasses, then sighed and reached for the olive-green Steiner binoculars resting on the ledge next to Booth's elbow. He saw Booth's bare index finger tap the rifle's action a couple of times, smiling to himself as he remembered the afternoon Booth finally put on the gloves he'd resisted wearing for months and how the stubborn old sniper cut the tip off the index finger on the right hand glove while muttering something about _trigger feel_.

"Swann told me I'd find you here," Bastone said, again drawing no outward response from Booth, whose lips pursed slightly as he held his brooding silence. Bastone shook his head and shrugged, then began to sweep the binoculars in a slow arc across the horizon.

Even after four tours of duty in Afghanistan, the beauty of the place never failed to surprise him. Although the region averaged less than six inches of rain per year, thanks to an American-funded program in the 1950s that built a system of irrigation canals, the Marjah district was one of Afghanistan's most productive agricultural areas. Ironically, the fifty year-old network of canals fed fields which, in addition to producing cotton, corn and wheat, accounted for nearly one-tenth of the world's supply of opium. Attempts by U.S. forces and the Afghan government in Kabul to induce local farmers to give up the illicit crop met with limited success. The annual subsidy for those farmers who agreed to give up poppy cultivation was less than one-tenth of the $20,000 per acre that they could earn growing opium. Many farmers agreed to give up the crop, accepted the subsidy, then surreptitiously continued to grow opium in the portions of their fields that were invisible from the roads traveled by Afghan government inspectors.

The view from the guard tower on the north end of the base left little doubt as to the abysmal success of the poppy eradication program. Ironically, there was something beautiful about the way the red and white flowers dotted the broad green fields, fringed with tall, swaying stalks of corn, yet behind each of those beautiful blooms was the grim truth that Marjah's poppy fields bankrolled the very insurgency that the men of Alpha 3623 came to Afghanistan to fight.

"It wasn't your fault," Bastone offered.

Booth shrugged, raising his chin slightly before returning his gaze to the rifle's scope. "Easy for you to say," he grumbled, panning the rifle to the right as he followed a truck that passed along the road in the distance, leaving a billowing cloud of dust in its wake. "You weren't there."

A minute went by in silence as Bastone scanned the fields through his binoculars and thought about what Swann told him after Booth disappeared not ten minutes after the two returned from a six-hour patrol with the men of _Alif _platoon. The young sergeant was worried because his "battle-buddy" had been brooding in angry, hard-eyed silence since climbing into the Humvee a half hour earlier. Swann took his concerns straight to Bastone since his fireteam leader, Parnell, was at a Marine base a few kilometers away where a Marine medical battalion was treating an Afghan corporal who was shot in the shoulder.

Bastone could feel the tension rolling off of Booth in silent waves as his hand loosened and then tightened again around the rifle's pistol grip, his ungloved index finger always flush against the side of the action, right above the trigger assembly. The dust finally settled over the dirt road in the distance, and Booth exhaled slowly as his sight picture grew clearer. Booth's bare arms were covered with a sheen of sweat as the low, hot afternoon sun crept under the tower's corrugated steel roof and Bastone knew that the old sergeant was replaying the afternoon's events on a constant loop in his head by the way the sinews of his arms and bearded jaw shifted and tensed.

"The woman's going to make it," Bastone said, setting the binoculars down on the ledge as he turned to Booth, who loosened his grip on his rifle but held his stubborn silence as he stared into the distance. "She's gonna be okay."

Booth swallowed hard, rolling his lips together in a firm line so that they disappeared beneath his dark, silver-peppered beard. The ANA corporal was not the only casualty of the chaotic midday skirmish with the insurgents. Bile rose in the back of Booth's throat as he remembered hearing a woman shouting in Pashto and then, amid the sharp crackle of small arms fire coming from the far side of a nearby irrigation canal, the blood-curdling sound of her screams.

The young woman had been walking home from the canal with her four year-old son and a red plastic jerry can full of water. Not ten seconds after Booth and his men emerged from an alley and began moving down the street towards the canal. Her ears filled with the popping, crackling sound of gunfire as insurgents opened fire on the joint Afghan/American patrol. Though she and the boy sought cover behind a crumbling stone wall, she was hit in the thigh and calf as she covered her son's trembling body with her own.

Bastone heard Sergeant First Class Dawson bark over the wideband radio that there were two (possibly three) "friendlies" down, and his own patrol beat a quick path to the other side of the neighborhood to help Booth and his men secure the situation. When he returned to the base an hour later and saw Booth step out of the Humvee with blood smeared on the front of his uniform shirt and a stony look in his eyes, Bastone knew that the sergeant major was deeply disturbed by how the situation had rapidly spiraled out of control.

Booth drew a breath, then pursed his lips. "And the boy?"

A faint smile cracked Bastone's face at hearing Booth's low voice croak out the question. He long ago had pegged the cocky, snarky, swaggering sergeant major with a Philly edge as a softie on the inside, especially when it came to children. For months he'd watched Booth pause in the middle of foot patrols to watch boys play soccer in a dusty, grassless field. He knew that, of all the men in the Alpha, Booth was always the one who kept a handful of Jolly Ranchers candy in the thigh pocket of his ACUs to pass out to any local kids they encountered along the way. Every night he saw Booth look at the photos of his own son on his iPod before pulling the sheet over his shoulder and giving into sleep. He knew that the old sniper kept Parker's school picture in his chest pocket, right over his heart, and a handwritten letter from the boy in the left thigh pocket of his fatigues where he could reach it, even when crouched with a rifle propped on his other thigh.

As much of a hard-ass as Booth could seem at times when he wanted to be, there was little doubt in any of the men's minds that their senior sergeant had a soft spot for children.

"He's alright," Bastone explained, nothing the long sigh of relief Booth breathed at hearing the news. "He's got a bruised elbow and a skinned knee, but was more scared and upset than anything, so—"

Booth pulled away from the scope and leaned back in his folding chair. "Poor kid," he said, remembering holding the terrified boy in his arms as Swann and Hackett gave first aid to the mother and tried to stop the bleeding. He remembered brushing the hair out of the boy's crying eyes and how the soft strands stuck together with the tacky feel of blood, and how he'd ran his hand over the boy's small head looking for an injury, only to discover that the blood the boy was covered with was his mother's, not his own.

"Two female Marines from the 4th Civil Affairs Group took him back to his village. He's gonna stay with relatives until his mom can come home. They got her pumped her full of antibiotics and painkillers right now. Marine docs are sayin' she needs to stay at Camp Marjah for a few days to make sure she doesn't develop an infection or complications."

A quiet sigh rattled in Booth's throat and he nodded. "She looked pretty torn up," he said through gritted teeth, pulling off his sunglasses and wiping the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand. "Swann said she was lucky that it didn't hit an artery."

He suddenly fell silent, and a dark look passed over his face as he remembered watching Swann hunch over her howling form, cinching the black nylon tourniquet around her torn calf. Booth shrugged and put his mirrored wraparound sunglasses back on again and turned back to look downrange through his rifle's scope. After a moment, he sighed and said, "I tried to get 'em to cease fire, you know. It just—I tried to get that idiot lieutenant, Hadid, to get 'em to cool it, but...I just…by the time I got 'em to stop shooting, you know, it was...Mashriqi was down, and that woman and her kid were out there, and God only knew what—"

"Booth," Bastone said, gently but firmly.

Booth shook his head with a frustrated grunt, his dry, chapped lips disappearing between his almost-black moustache and the graying scruff on his chin.

"Lookit, alright?" Bastone pressed him, leaning over the sandbag and looking down at Booth as he stared through the scope of his rifle. "It wasn't our guy…you know, who shot the woman. The bullet fragments they pulled out of her thigh were from a 7.62 by 39, Booth, not 5.56."

Booth blinked and sat back in his chair, his brows furrowing as he considered the revelation. After a moment, he pulled off his patrol cap and set it on his thigh, ruffling the sweat out of his close-cropped hair with the palm of his gloved hand and wiping it on the dusty thigh of his trousers.

"Are they sure?" he asked. "I mean, those kinds of rounds bust into a million fucking pieces and—"

Bastone crossed his arms and leaned against the steel pillar that held up the corner of the guard tower's roof. "Those Marine docs spend every day picking bullets and pieces of bullets out of people. If they tell me it was an AK round, I'm gonna take that shit to the bank. It was an AK round, Booth. It was theirs, not ours. Our boys may've been out of control, but they didn't shoot that woman."

Letting go of a long-held breath, Booth nodded and looked down, staring for a few moments at the cloudy white stain of evaporated sweat around the band of his cap, and scratching with his ungloved fingernail at the powdery specks of sand clinging to the letters of his nametape affixed to the Velcro strip on the back.

"Still," he said, glancing out at the fields on the other side of the base's perimeter. "My guys fucking blue-on-blued today. Who needs the fuckin' Taliban if our guys are shootin' at each other? I mean, shit, Lou. Blue on _fuckin' _blue, dammit."

Bastone raised his bushy black brows and shrugged. "Yeah," he admitted with a nod. "And you know more than anybody that shit like that happens. We wish it wouldn't, we'll debrief 'em tomorrow before we go out to try and make sure it doesn't happen again, but shit happens. He's gonna be okay."

Booth's jaw hardened and he shook his head but said nothing as he leaned forward, tucked the butt of the rifle against his shoulder and again settled behind the scope.

One of the Alpha's two qualified snipers, Booth typically carried a Mark 12, a special type of rifle issued only to Navy SEALs and U.S. Army Special Forces designated marksmen. The Mark 12 was a highly modified version of the Army's standard M16 equipped with a customized free-floating barrel and 11.5x scope that gave Booth the ability to "reach out and touch someone" using the special match-grade 5.56x45mm ammunition loaded into its thirty-round magazine. Booth favored the lighter, more compact Mark 12 over the substantially more accurate M25 sniper rifle that fired the more powerful, longer-range 7.62x51mm NATO round. He hated being weighed down in the field, preferring to be fast and light—_high speed, low drag_, as Swann liked to say—and so only carried the heavier, bulkier M25 when the mission absolutely demanded it.

Booth remembered how livid his drill sergeant at Fort Benning had been when he failed the test of math and geometry they gave him towards the end of Basic Training. _"You're smart, son,"_ the leather-skinned, thick-voiced Vietnam Vet drawled when he discovered that Booth got half of the questions wrong._ "Too fucking smart to flag this test, and too fucking smart for your own good."_

Booth had opened the test and saw the first page full of algebraic equations, parabolas and questions about _π. _The parabola questions made him suspect that he was being tested for aptitude so he could be assigned to a mortar squad. He quickly decided he wanted no part of that and deliberately answered as many of the questions wrong as he could without making it too obvious that he was intentionally flagging the test. Even at nineteen, Seeley Booth knew he didn't want to spend his whole three-year active duty enlistment lugging around heavy mortar tubes and baseplates. Twenty years and several wars later, he still did what he could to avoid carrying a heavier load than was absolutely necessary.

For a while, Booth held his silence and kept his eyes and—at least as far as Bastone could tell—his mind focused downrange, trying to let go of and forget for a little while what had happened that day. Bastone picked up the binoculars again and let his own gaze wander downrange as the soft afternoon breeze finally picked up and turned the distant fields of corn and poppy into pink-dotted green waves of undulating motion. Several minutes went by and neither man uttered a word. Finally, Booth pulled away from the scope, sat back in his metal folding chair and flipped his mirrored sunglasses onto the top of his head.

"We should just buy all the fucking stuff," he muttered.

Bastone's bushy black brows furrowed in confusion. "What?"

"All that shit down there," Booth said, nodding towards the fields below with a jerk of his bearded chin. "All the fucking poppies. We should just go in with our checkbook and say, 'Look, however much of this shit you grow, we'll buy. Whatever the Taliban says they'll pay you for it, we'll pay you twenty-five percent more.' It'd have to be cheaper and a fuck-ton more effective than this stupid fucking Kabuki theater the Marines are doing with these bullshit subsidies and crap. Just buy the fucking stuff, send it back to the States and let the U.S. be the world's biggest processor of opiate narcotics." Seeing Bastone's skeptically cocked eyebrow, he crossed his arms in front of his chest and shrugged. "I'm tellin' ya, man. We can call it 'Operation Vicodin.' Think about it."

"What the fuck is Hamid Karzai thinking?" Bastone said, stroking the twin tufts of beard on his deeply-cleft chin and nodding in mock approval as his dark brown eyes glittered with silent laughter. "Yeah, him and the Marines should definitely have checked with you before launching that whole 'Marjah Accelerated Agricultural Transition' thing. What a bunch of fucking douchebags. They've got the big honkin' FBI expert from Washington right here in fuckin' Marjah. If they only knew."

Booth slowly turned and glared at his friend with a roll of his eyes. "Fuck you, Bastone."

"Yeah?" the first sergeant snorted, acknowledging his buddy with a jerk of his chin. "Fuck you, Booth."

* * *

**A/N: **_Greetings from Sweden! Yet again, the flying monkey posts fic from afar :-)_

_Yes, this chapter was a touch angstier than the one before it. One of my biggest frustrations with the canonical handling of Booth's Afghanistan experience is the fact that we never really saw how that experience (7 months in a war zone fighting a violent insurgency, killing men and seeing men killed) affected Booth, or the long-lasting mark that experience left on him as a man. Part of my goal in this piece is to show some of that. No man or woman comes home from war the same person they were before they deployed. _

_This series is dramatically different than anything else posting out there right now. I would love to know what you think of it. Please—share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Leave a review, or shoot me a note on Twitter. My username there is "_dharmamonkey" (don't forget the all-important "_" at the beginning; otherwise you'll be chatting up someone else who's a very nice guy but doesn't really care about Bones or Booth in Afghanistan)._

_The next chapter will shed some more light on some of the younger men Booth served with—Swann, Hackett, Makovsky and Lukas—and how they saw their senior NCOs, Booth and Bastone. _

_Also in development are chapters that show us what Booth thought about Brennan while he was deployed and what he experienced on the day he woke up in the hospital after the crash, and how he responded to the news that the other men of his unit had not survived the mission._

_I hope you stick with me as this journey continues!_

_As always, thanks for reading!_

**Editorial notes: **

_(1) Yet another shout-out to _**FauxMaven **_for lending me her keen eye as the beta-reader for this project. She's been a real help in curbing my Joycean tendencies towards long, loping sentences._

_(2) The bits about the poppy eradication efforts in Helmand province are factual, as is the reference to the U.S. funding of irrigation in the Marjah area. (I really couldn't make that shit up. The truth is often stranger than fiction.) _


	7. Shipping

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**Chapter 7: Shipping**

* * *

The four men sat in a circle, each man sitting on a foot locker, with a fifth rugged plastic trunk in the middle of them to serve as a table. On their makeshift card table rested four cans of Diet Coke, a messy pile of playing cards, a cheap plastic ashtray, and an iPod Touch connected to a pair of battery-powered portable speakers. The speakers buzzed with each slow-stepping twang of the song's opening chord as a broad, clear male voice began to sing:

_A company  
__Always on the run  
__A destiny  
__It's the rising sun..._

Sergeant First Class Lukas paused from dealing to look up, pursing his lips approvingly as he bobbed his head to the easy, loping rhythm of the guitar and began to sing along.

_I was born  
__A shotgun in my hands  
__Behind the gun  
__I'll make my final stand  
__And that's why they call me..._

Momentarily distracted from the fact that he'd laid three cards on the table but hadn't been dealt replacements, Staff Sergeant Swann looked up with a broad, toothy grin and chimed in with the last line just in time to join Lukas in banging his head as the band's bass, drums and backup guitar swung down like a hammer, swelling the song's sound and testing the limits of the tiny speakers' capacity.

_Bad Company  
__I can't deny  
__Bad, bad Company till the day I die..._

"Best fucking cover song ever," Lukas declared as the chorus faded and the second verse began.

Staff Sergeant Hackett frowned at his cards and slapped two of them onto the table with a sardonic laugh. "You know the Old Man would go on a big ol' rant if he heard you blaspheme the original."

"I wasn't dissing the original, dumbass," Lukas shot back with a roll of his eye as he tapped the deck of cards against his thigh. "That's why I said this was the best _cover_ ever. You should listen, you know—with your big, flapping ears."

Hackett's only reply was a sharp roll of his hazel eyes and a firmly extended middle finger.

Lukas acknowledged the gesture with a grin and a quick upward jerk of his chin. "Back at ya, baby," he said, puckering his lips and making a kiss sound as Swann snickered next to him.

Doffing his patrol cap and setting his cards face down on the black plastic footlocker, Staff Sergeant Makovsky reached down and pulled off his sweat-logged T-shirt, rolling it into a ball and tossing it, free-throw style, over Swann's head and onto his bunk across the aisle.

"It's too fucking hot today," he grumbled to no one in particular as he reached for his cap and wiped it across the sweaty back of his neck, then pulled the hat low over his eyes, curving the already-rounded brim with a pinch of his fingers. He leaned forward with a frown, snatched his smoldering cigarette from the rim of the ashtray and fetched his cards.

Lukas shot him a strange look. "Makovsky," he said with a snort, "you act like you've never been here before." He felt a bead of sweat dribble down the middle of his own bare back, closing his eyes with a sigh as he pressed his cold can of Coke against the nape of his neck, holding it there for a second before setting it in front of him and cracking open the pop-top. "Maybe you got your bell rung a bit harder than we all thought in that game yesterday. Booth did hit you pretty good."

"Nah," Hackett said, yanking off his own cap—the same sweat-stained, sun-faded Sun Devils ballcap he always wore in the barracks—and wiping the beads of perspiration off his broad, freckled forehead. "He just likes to bitch."

Makovsky plucked his cigarette out of his mouth and scowled at the Arizonan as he snorted twin streams of white smoke out of his nostrils. "Fuck you, Hackett," he growled, flicking the ash into the tray and taking another long drag on it as Lukas and Swann just laughed. "You like this shit, don't you? The heat and the sand. Reminds you of home. All's that's missing is the taco stands, huh?"

"I'm from Flagstaff, you douche," Hackett snapped back. "Look at a fucking map. Not all of Arizona is desert, you fucking idiot."

Unable to come up with a better response on the fly, Makovsky rolled his eyes at the remark, glanced at his his watch and frowned. "Where the fuck are they?" he asked. "It's been three, goin' on four hours already."

Swann looked up from a momentary daze, a fresh, unlit cigarette dangling loosely from his lips as he held his lighter in his cupped hands. "What?" His sandy brows furrowed over his blue eyes as his cigarette bobbed between his lips as he spoke. "Who?"

Lukas grunted out a laugh and finished dealing each man his draw. He looked once at the pair of abandoned cards in front of him, dealt himself two more and set the rest of the deck down next to the ashtray. He picked up his cards and fanned them out between his long forefingers, nibbling the inside of his lower lip as he studied his hand with a barely-audible _hmmph. _

A heavy wave of grainy guitar riffs heralded the next song on Lukas' playlist as a rough tenor began to sing.

_Let us have peace, let us have life,  
__Let us escape the cruel night.  
__Let us have time, let the sun shine,  
__Let us beware the deadly sign..._

Swann cleared his throat and cocked his head to the side, his brows arched expectantly. "Who?" he prompted Makovsky, his impatient leg bouncing up and down as the heel of his boot tapped quietly against the side of his footlocker.

Makovsky pulled another long drag on his cigarette and chuckled, exhaling ragged puffs of smoke from his nose as he laughed. "The Holy Trinity, of course," he said. _The Holy Trinity _was the term coined by Makovsky, himself a former altar boy at St. George Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Chicago, to refer to the detachment's three Roman Catholic NCOs: Booth, Bastone and Kennedy. "They and the captain went over to attend mass—"

"Oh, well, _duh_." Swann rolled his eyes, annoyed at himself for not decoding Makovsky's complaint more quickly. "No shit they're at mass," he spat. "They go every week, you fool."

"Yeah?" Makovsky huffed, realizing he'd smoked his cigarette almost down to the filter. "Still, a friggin' mass shouldn't take more than an hour and they've been gone three already."

Snuffing out his quickly-smoked cigarette in the tray, Makovsky reached into the thigh pocket of his fatigues and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. He flipped the box open with his thumb and slid a cigarette far enough out that he could grab it with his lips. His growl silenced by the cigarette between his lips, he flipped the pack closed again and stuffed it back into his pocket in a sequence of movements so smooth it struck Lukas as almost artistic.

"Besides, it's the second time this week," Makovsky grumbled, cupping his hands around the end of his cigarette as he lit it with a _chhhk_ of his Zippo lighter. "Next thing you know, we'll find out they've all gone and changed MOS's to 56-Mike."

His remark drew a snort from Lukas as the weapons sergeant imagined Booth and Bastone switching their military occupational specialties to 56M, _Chaplain's Assistant. _"That'll be the day," Lukas said with a laugh.

"Wouldn't it, though?" Makovsky muttered, his cheeks hollowing as he drew a sharp, hard drag on his cigarette and reached up to wipe away the sweat that had gathered at the nape of his neck. On the inside of his right forearm was a tattoo of the Byzantine cross, with its three distinctive crossbeams cutting across his smooth skin.

Swann studied the heavy lines of black ink on his comrade's arm for a moment before his icy blue eyes narrowed and a sly grin crept across his face. "You're just pissed because you want to go see your jarhead trading post buddy," he said with a smirk.

"Yeah?" Makovsky's brown eyes darkened as his head cocked to one side, his jaw shifting forward as he regarded Swann with a hard look. "What do you know about it, Kansas?" he grunted.

_Iowa, _Swann retorted silently, refusing to let Makovsky change the subject by egging him on about Kansas versus Iowa when the advantage in the conversation had clearly shifted in his favor. He just quietly grinned, his gaze swiveling from one side to the other as he met Lukas' and Hackett's eyes, then brought his cigarette to his mouth and look a languid puff. Swann held the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds before letting go, forming wispy rings of white smoke with his slender, chapped lips.

"Bastone's been onto you for a month, Makovsky," he told the gruff Chicagoan. "Booth, too."

The Russian-American sergeant's nostrils flared but his eyes held their hardened gaze as he glared at Swann.

"Booth and Bastone," Hackett crooned, his lips parted in a crooked grin. "Heh. Yeah. _Boostone._"

Lukas laughed. "What?"

"Booth and Bastone," Hackett said again. "You know, '_Boostone_.' Think about it. Those two tell each other everything. If you let something slip in front of one of 'em, you might as well have just told the other one. They always bunk next to each other. Bastone's always trying to get Booth to smoke with him. They even share a bottle of Aleve. I mean, seriously..."

"They _are_ kinda cute together," Lukas agreed, his voice peaking a little as he held back a snicker. "Such a beautiful bromance, the two of them."

The scowl on Makovsky's face softened and melted into a cock-browed smirk. "What the fuck are you two talking about?"

"Bromances, dude," Hackett said, his brow creasing as he turned and saw the flummoxed look on Swann's sunburned face. "Come on. You know—like House and that other doc played by Robert Sean Leonard in _House..._or Shatner and that other dude in _Boston Legal. _Crap—what's his name?"

"James Spader," Lukas offered helpfully. "My wife fucking loved that show. She went into goddamn mourning when it ended. Seriously—you'd have thought somebody fuckin' died when they said it wasn't being renewed. She's got all five seasons on DVD." He arched his arms behind him, stretching his back and shoulders with an audible _pop_. "I always thought those end scenes with the two of them smoking cigars and drinking on the patio at the end of each episode was kind of...I dunno...weird, I guess."

"Hmm." Swann ruffled his sweaty, overgrown buzzcut with his hand, leaving it sticking up in dozen different spiky directions. "When you call 'em _Boostone_, that's kinda weird. Creepy. Like you're shipping 'em or something."

Makovsky arched a puzzled brow as he nearly choked on his Coke. "Shipping?" he coughed. "What are you talking about?"

Lukas and Hackett exchanged a knowing look, and the latter's hazel eyes glittered as his lips curved into a crooked smirk.

"Shipping," Lukas said with a grin. "You know—like how all X-Files fans were hoping that Scully and Mulder would get together."

"Oh jeez," Swann said with a shake of his head and a loud snort, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. "My girlfriend and her best friend are huge fans of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer _and have had this running argument for, what, like ten years about whether Angel or Spike was Buffy's true love. Sarah's a fan of Buffy with Angel—or, as she calls it, 'Bangel'—while her friend is all about 'Spuffy'. It's crazy. Wacky-ass, batshit crazy. And hilarious to listen to 'em talk about."

Hackett laughed and quickly glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting the detachment's lead sergeants to walk in at any moment. "I'm tellin' ya," he said with a waggle of his brows. "_Boostone. _Think about it. They're perfect for each other."

Makovsky squeezed his eyes shut and managed to swallow his last gulp of Coke without choking or snorting his soda out of his nose. "So which one of 'em would be more likely to kick your ass if he heard you say that?"

"Booth," Hackett said. "Definitely. That guy can go from zero to totally pissed in 2.3 seconds."

"Nuh-uh." Lukas shook his head. "No way. Booth's a sniper—a listener. Quiet and patient. He'd bide his time. Bastone's more of a hothead. _He'd_ be the one to go off. He'd be halfway to ruining your life before Booth'd even finished planning how he'd fuck you up."

"You're both wrong," Swann said, his pale blue eyes peering out from under deeply furrowed brows. "Booth and Bastone are like NATO—a mutual defense pact. Attack one, you'll be fighting both of 'em."

"Huh," Makovsky grunted noncommittally crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned back on his foot locker.

A few moments of thoughtful silence fell over the group before a grin cracked Lukas' carefully-pursed lips. "Oh yeah," he snickered. "Total bromance, those two."

"Totally," Hackett said, tipping back his Coke and draining it in two swallows. "That shit's a no-brainer."

All four heads swung around as the bright, wide shaft of afternoon sunlight that had been shining through the open door of the barracks hut abruptly narrowed. First Sergeant Bastone stood in the doorway and smirked at the four "kid sergeants" for a moment before lazily glancing over his shoulder. Booth suddenly appeared behind him, the two of them eclipsing the sunlight that had illuminated the young sergeants' card game.

"What'd I tell you?" Bastone said, gesturing towards the card table with a snort and a soft jerk of his chin. "Huh?"

Booth merely grunted in reply as he stood with his hands propped on his hips and studied the scene before him with a heavy-lidded expression. Seeing the ashtray brimming with crushed butts next to the piles of playing cards arrayed messily on the footlocker-turned-table reminded him of his first war twenty years before. He remembered sitting in a barracks tent in the desert of Saudi Arabia with the other men in his platoon with beads of sweat rolling down the middle of his bare back as he hunched over his cards, trying like hell to win back the four prized chicken a la king MREs he'd lost in a prior game.

Then another memory flashed before his eyes: that of the three straight days he spent in a dimly-lit casino on the Vegas strip, watching $35 turn into a cool $10,000 and vanish again into a gut-wrenching spiral of bad luck that left an empty bank account and a pile of bounced checks in its wake. He felt sick just thinking about the two years it took to dig out of the hole he dug himself into with his gambling.

Bastone saw the sergeant major's jaw tense and brow knit low over his eyes as Booth silently shrugged off a visibly troubling thought. He had an idea what it was but said nothing. He watched with a quiet murmur of concern as Booth's eyes swiveled over and met Swann's, then surveyed the other three soldiers, all of whom stared back with awkward, dimly guilty looks on their faces.

"You know what's really a fuckin' no-brainer, Hackett?" Bastone asked, shifting his and Booth's focus as he glared at the freckle-shouldered Arizonan. "The fact that your buddy Lieutenant Rahimi is waiting in the mess for you and Swann to debrief him and his platoon's squad leaders."

Swann's eyes widened in recognition as he glanced down at his watch and saw that 1600 hours had come around far more quickly than he'd thought.

"Aww, fuck," he said, snuffing out his half-smoked cigarette with one hand and smacking Hackett hard in the bicep with the other. "Dammit..."

"Ow!" Hackett yelped, slapping Swann's arm away with a scowl. "Keep your hands off of me, you douche..."

Bastone grinned as he watched the two of them nearly fall over their footlockers as they stood up and scrambled for their shirts and patrol caps.

Swann looked at Booth with an arched brow that seemed to silently query for forgiveness. Booth blinked, cocking his head to one side as he gazed back under a heavy, furrowed brow that left little question in Swann's mind that the sergeant major had expected better of him. Swann offered nothing in the way of comment but gave an apologetic shrug as Booth leaned against the doorway, turning aside to let the two men pass as they walked out of the barracks. Swann's and Hackett's boots crunched against the sand as they jogged away and faded into the distance.

Shaking his head wth a sigh, Booth opened a can of Sprite, its loud, crisp crack shattering the moment of quiet that hung between him, Bastone and the two remaining kid sergeants. He tilted the can back and took a long drink, then ripped open the Velcro flap of his thigh pocket and fished out a small plastic bottle. His eyes met Bastone's as he thumbed open the lid and shook three tiny blue tablets into his hand. He snapped the lid back on and was about to stow it back in his pocket when Bastone cleared his throat.

"Hey!" the gruff Italian said, holding up his hand and snapping his fingers impatiently.

"Oh yeah," Booth replied with a faintly sheepish grin. He shook the bottle once and heard a half dozen or so pills rattle around inside. "You get the next one, pal," he said as tossed it underhand to Bastone, who easily caught it one-handed.

Bastone rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, I know," he said. "I got that the first four times you told me, you fuck."

"Then why'd you forget to stock up while we were over there?" Booth asked with a smirk that belied his feigned annoyance. "Your memory's worse than mine, pal. I think you can take ginseng or something for that."

The comment hung in the air for a moment, unacknowledged but for a quiet snicker from Lukas. Bastone popped two of the naproxen tablets and washed them down with Coke, then grinned and tossed the bottle back to Booth.

"Fuck you, Booth."

* * *

**A/N: **_Quick props to _**oddestcastle**_ whose Twitter DM helped inspire this chapter._

_This one was a bit lighter than the last chap but hopefully was still to your liking. Don't keep me in the dark though—please leave a review!_

_Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it. No matter our circumstances or station in life, we all have something to be thankful for. _

**Editorial note: **_For those curious, the two songs the soldiers were listening to on SFC Lukas' iPod were (a) "Bad Company" by Five Finger Death Punch (a 2009 cover of the 1974 original by Bad Company), and (b) "Blitzkrieg" by Metallica (a 1987 cover of the 1981 original by Blitzkrieg)._


	8. Feet

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**Chapter 8: Feet**

* * *

"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience."

—_Patrick Henry (in a speech to the Second Virginia Convention, March 20, 1775)_

* * *

Swann had seen him do it a couple of times before, but for whatever reason, he never gave it much thought until that afternoon.

Though Booth was Swann's "battle buddy" and had become a mentor of sorts to the young sergeant since joining the Alpha that spring, that dusty, hot mid-July afternoon was the first time that Swann found himself alone in the barracks with Booth. Down in Helmand, Booth normally shared a barracks with Captain Torres, Warrant Officer First Class Sivick and the three E-8 sergeants (Bastone, Kennedy and Parnell). But up at Forward Operating Base Gamberi in Laghman Province in the northeast of the country, barracks space was at a premium, so Booth and Swann lived in a hastily clapped-together particleboard hut with Lukas and Kennedy, the other two instructors. The four men had spent two weeks at FOB Gamberi teaching a course in special weapons and tactics to a hand-picked class of Afghan National Army troops.

The hands-on nature of the course required the instructors to walk around from student to student, occasionally stopping to crouch, kneel or even lay on their bellies in the dust to counsel one of the students on the finer points of aiming or follow-through.

However, this particular day, the instructors spent most of their time on their feet as they trained the ANAs on proper use of the RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade system. Used by both government forces and the Taliban insurgents, RPGs were ubiquitous in Afghanistan although few of the Afghans had ever received proper instruction on the safe and effective use of them.

Swann had noticed the change in Booth's posture and gait over the course of the day. In particular, he noted how the sergeant major seemed to rock in place so his weight was centered on his heels or the outsides of his feet. As the afternoon wore on, Swann saw Booth's jaw twitch and tighten as he walked, silently and subtly registering a flash of pain with each step. Swann, who trained as a medic before joining the Special Forces, watched the sergeant major plop himself onto his bunk as soon as they returned to their barracks hut and quickly, if somewhat gingerly, peel off his boots.

Bending over to loosen his own bootlaces, Swann watched out of the corner of his eye as Booth pulled a bottle of Aleve from his thigh pocket. With a grunt of discomfort and frustration, Booth dug into one of the zippered compartments of his assault pack, rummaging around a bit before finally retrieving a small plastic jar of IcyHot.

Booth's brows sloped low over his eyes as he tossed three of the little blue Aleve tablets into his mouth and washed them down with a swig of lukewarm bottled water. He yanked off his sweat-logged socks and let them fall to the floor in a quiet crumple, wincing slightly as he wiggled his now-liberated toes. With a long, tired sigh, he swung his legs onto the bed and loosely crossed them as he unscrewed the cap from the jar of IcyHot. He swiped a wad of the mentholated ointment onto his forefingers and began to tenderly rub the salve into the sole of his foot.

A few seconds went by before the menthol's effects kicked in, at first offering relief by way of a cooling sensation that slowly faded into a warmth that seemed to soften the tightness that had plagued him for the better part of the afternoon. After a minute, as the throbbing ache in his foot was replaced by the anaesthetic tingle of the IcyHot, Booth breathed a relieved sigh and, for the first time since he'd plopped himself on his bunk, raised his head to meet Swann's cool, blue-eyed gaze. For a few long moments, their eyes locked but neither said a word as Booth's thumb drew small, firm circles along the arch of his foot, gently loosening the tightness in his tendons and muscles.

Swann's eyes widened as Booth's big, thickly-veined hand moved and revealed a pair of faint white scars that ran jaggedly across the arch of his right foot. He'd once overheard Kennedy and Parnell talking back in Qūryah about the sergeant major being an ex-POW, but it wasn't until the moment he saw the scars criss-crossing Booth's feet that the rumor became real. He thought about the kind of injuries that could lay beneath the faded scars, and about the way Booth moved as he worked, quietly trying to keep his feet in motion and to shift his weight away from his arches and forefoot. Swann mentally thumbed through the injuries he'd learned about in the correspondence course in kinesiology he took the year before: Bosworth fractures, Jones fractures, Chopart's fracture-dislocations…

"Lisfranc?" Swann asked him quietly, referring to a type of midfoot injury first documented during the Napoleonic Wars by the French physician Dr. Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin. Lisfranc wrote of a cavalry soldier who fell off a horse and suffered the displacement of the long bones of his midfoot from the cluster of bones comprising the ankle, which injury later became known as a Lisfranc injury.

Such injuries typically resulted from a fall from a significant height, having the top of the foot crushed by a heavy object, or having a flexed foot twisted while pivoting, but Booth's scarred soles told another story. Swann had read of _falaqa, _and once saw a man in Iraq who had been subjected to it under Saddam Hussein's regime. Years later, he still walked with crutches because of the way his feet had been shattered by the beatings. That man's soles were scarred almost exactly like Booth's.

Booth's massaging thumb stilled and he looked up, swallowing hard before letting his solemn eyes once more meet Swann's.

"Yes," he said, his jaw shifting to the side as he considered saying more. Booth gave a small shake of his head, but closed his mouth without another word. With a wince and a quiet grunt, he extended one leg and drew up the other foot to let it rest next on his thigh. He began the process again, smearing a couple of fingers' worth of the ointment on the aching arch and massaging it in with his thumb.

"It's the standing that's hardest, isn't it?" Swann asked carefully, his soft blue eyes narrowing slightly as he watched Booth with a medic's concern. "Walking's easier, huh?"

Booth nodded but didn't look up, focusing his gaze on his hands and the way the greasy ointment made the sole of his tender foot shine under the sterile white light of the incandescent bulb that hung overhead.

"The other guys know," Swann said, scratching his neck where the waves of his sandy-colored beard tickled his throat. "I mean, that you get these aches and pains, but not…" He fell silent for a moment as Booth's thumb slowed and he wondered if the older man was going to speak. After a second, he continued. "The others don't know, like, umm...you know, _how_ your feet got messed up. Only Parnell and Kennedy, and Bastone of course."

Booth looked up and met Swann's gaze, not with a hard look, but rather one of a warm, shimmery softness that revealed a deep vulnerability that the young sergeant had seen only one other time—when his mentor spoke of his fondness for his scientist partner back home. Swann knew that look was borne of a level of trust that was rare for the edgy, enigmatic Philadelphian, and he silently resolved to guard that trust as a treasure.

"And me," he said. "But I won't say anything." Swann heard Booth let go of a breath, then offered his mentor a soft, reassuring smile. "It's not for me to tell."

Rubbing the back of his hand against the silvery scruff on his bearded chin, Booth rolled his lips together in a firm line and stared over Swann's shoulder into the distance, then nodded. He drew his other leg up and sat Indian-style on his bunk as he began to speak.

"They held me for three days and four nights," he began, his voice even and a little vacant as he remembered the afternoon nearly twenty years ago when his pain-addled prayers had been answered and he was rescued from the dark cell in an Iraqi prison. Booth took a deep breath, then with a nod of self-encouragement, continued.

"I got picked up in Samawah after they ambushed me and Matthews. He was assigned to be my new spotter after I...when, I, umm…" Booth faltered, then took a deep breath and tried again. "I lost my spotter, Parker, on a mission near Al-Khidhir, you know, when the 101st was making the big push north towards the Euphrates. They assigned Matthews to me after, you know. Anyway, I got captured in Samawah and 'cause I was a sniper, they thought I knew stuff. When the beatings, pistol-whipping and electric shock didn't work, they went for my feet. They…"

Swann leaned forward, suspecting from the dark tone of Booth's voice and the hesitance in his speech that he hadn't spoken of his experience to very many people in the two decades since Desert Storm. The young sergeant's sandy brown eyebrows arched expectantly, creasing his broad forehead as he listened.

"They had these little clubs," Booth continued. "Little wooden bastards about yay long…" He indicated with his hands a length of eight inches. "With a lead weight on one end, and the whole thing was wrapped in leather."

"Oh, man," Swann whispered, wincing at the thought of what Booth had gone through.

Meeting Swann's eyes for just a moment, Booth grimaced then sighed, breaking off eye contact as he continued.

"They tipped my chair over," he explained, "so my feet stuck straight up in the air. At first I thought they were just trying to make the blood rush to my head, settin' me up like that. Then the lieutenant colonel who was in charge of my interrogation came back into the room, grabbed that blackjack off the table and started wailin' on my feet." Booth reached up and stroked his slightly-greasy fingertips over his beard, tugging on one of the longer tufts on his chin. "I've been shot, blown up, beaten, burned, hit by cars and a fuckton of other things, but that...what they did to me in Iraq, that was by far the most painful thing I've ever been through."

He fell silent again, smoothing his moustache with the side of his index finger as he felt a wave of nausea wash over him. "They almost broke me, Mike," he said grimly, some of the color leaching from his tanned face as he waded through memories he spent two decades trying to forget. "If I hadn't've passed out from the pain, they'd have broke me. I just...it hurt so fucking bad, I didn't care about anything else. I just wanted it to stop."

Booth fell silent once more, slumping his shoulders as he ran his fingers over his hair, hair that used to be long enough to thread his fingers through but which now, in need of a good trim but fairly close to regulation-length, was barely enough to cover his fingernails. He rubbed the heels of his hands over his eyes and breathed a tired, ragged sigh.

"Open reduction with internal fixation?" Swann asked. Booth's hands fell away from his eyes as his lip curled in confusion. He had thought he'd left squinty medical jargon behind when he parted ways with Brennan at Dulles months earlier. "Plates and screws?" Swann clarified. "Or Kirschner wires? To fix the fractures, I mean."

Booth blinked, impressed that the young sergeant fluent enough in orthopedics to spout off terminology that would've made his eyes cross if he hadn't become all too familiar with such things during his multiple stints at Army hospitals. "K-wires," he replied. He sat there for a moment in a pensive daze, then started speaking again. "They had me all wired up. Four in one foot, two in the other. I spent four months at Walter Reed before they let me go back to Fort Campbell. Six weeks in a wheelchair, then they had to teach me to walk again. Six months later, I finished Ranger School."

Swann couldn't suppress a grin at hearing the flash of pride in Booth's voice, but didn't respond. He simply smiled and nodded, unsure of what else to say. He knew Booth was brave and committed to the mission. He'd recognized it when he met the Alpha's new NCOIC in the dining hall at Fort Bragg and learned that the old Ranger had reenlisted and accepted a combat gig after being out of the service for a decade. But it wasn't until they arrived in Afghanistan and he saw Booth push through the pain to perform his duty, day in and day out, week after week, that he really came to idolize the older sergeant. Swann watched in silent admiration as Booth rubbed the last bits of IcyHot into his skin and tucked the little jar of ointment back into his assault pack, smiling as his mentor zipped his pack shut and looked up again.

"Hungry?" Booth asked with a vague grin as he reached down to grab his socks.

"Fuck yeah," Swann said, plucking his patrol cap off of his footlocker and pulling it snugly over his forehead.

"Good," Booth replied, grunting softly as he carefully slid his tender feet back into his boots. "Because I'm fucking starved."

* * *

A/N: _It was time to show Booth and Swann sharing some quality time. Booth and Swann share an affinity different than the one Booth shares with Bastone, but still, there's something to that bond that buoys them both. That chapter was admittedly a little heavier than the last, but that's life, right? The pendulum swings between the gritty and serious, on the one hand, and fun and frivolous on the other._

_You'll have to let me know what you thought of this one. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Please, please leave a review._

_As always, thanks for reading! _

**Editorial note: **_It's time again to broadcast my effusive gratitude to _**FauxMaven **_for taking the time to beta this chapter. She kicks my ass when I wax too wordy._


	9. Mail Call

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**Chapter 9: Mail Call**

* * *

Bastone clomped up the steel ladder and landed with a heavy tread on the plywood floor of the guard tower.

"You're brooding," he said, unslinging his M4 rifle from his shoulder and setting it to rest against the wall next to the machine gun.

"I'm not _brooding_," Booth grumbled, acknowledging his friend and second-in-command with a scowl that pulled his dark brows low over his eyes. He felt the first sergeant's critical gaze as he continued to stare downrange through his rifle's telescopic sight. "I just needed some time to think," he sighed. "_Alone._"

"Right," Bastone snorted, ignoring his friend's petulant hint as he shook his head and rolled his eyes. "It's Thursday, pal. You're brooding."

Booth grunted quietly and glared at Bastone.

Mail call at FOB Crossbow was on Thursday afternoons. Each week, Warrant Officer Sivick would distribute incoming mail to the men of Alpha 3623 after the last team came in from the day's patrol, and each week, Booth would stand in the back of the barracks with his arms crossed and wait for his name to be called. Every two weeks or so, Sivick would get to the bottom of the stack of letters and packages, call out Booth's name and reach over the heads of the kid sergeants to pass a brightly-colored envelope or small parcel to the grinning, shimmery-eyed veteran. Booth would run his callused fingertips over the handwritten address on the front, touching the tiny indentations in the paper as if by so doing he could feel the warmth of his son Parker's hand.

Many times, though, mail call would come and go, leaving Booth standing alone and empty-handed in the back of the room as the others hurried back to their respective bunks to pore over letters and care packages from their wives, girlfriends, kids and parents. On such days, Booth would grab his rifle, helmet and armored vest, stuff two bottles of water into the thigh pocket of his fatigues and retreat into the guard tower.

The early evening breeze tickled the hair on their bare arms moments before it began licking at the verdant rows of pink and white poppies in the fields beyond the outpost's sand-filled bastion walls. For a minute, Bastone sat behind the machine gun and observed Booth in silence. He wondered if the shifting of Booth's lightly-stubbled jaw and the narrowing of his eyes was some kind of Morse code that, given enough time, could actually be decoded into a semi-verbal grumble that could in turn be translated into an intelligible complaint.

"Thirteen weeks," Booth growled, tapping his finger impatiently on the side of his rifle for a few seconds before letting go with a long sigh and leaning back into his chair. "Look, I know she's holed up in West Bumfuck, Northern Mapoopoo Province but, still—how the hell long can it take for a single goddamn letter to come through?"

Bastone took a breath but couldn't come up with anything to say right then, so he just sighed and stared into his lap.

"Parker's letters get here in sixteen to twenty days from the time Rebecca mails 'em," Booth said, his voice edging upwards with frustration. "A couple times they've gotten hung up so I'll get two in one week, but still..."

Bastone reached into his thigh pocket and pulled out a half-empty pack of Marlboros. Tucking a cigarette between his lips, he cupped his hand around the lighter and lit the cigarette, giving it a couple of firm puffs to make sure it was lit.

"Here," he said, plucking the cigarette out of his mouth and handing it to Booth, who accepted it. Booth stared at the cigarette for a moment, then shrugged and brought it to his lips with a slight, nearly imperceptible waver in his normally steady hand.

Bastone lit himself a cigarette, giving it a couple of quick puffs before drawing a long, stiff drag as he watched the steady wavelike motion of the poppy fields under the orange tint of the fading afternoon sun. His gaze would periodically swivel over to observe his friend, who leaned forward in his chair, holding his rifle's pistol grip with his right hand and the smoldering cigarette in his left as he watched an armored Humvee make its way along the edge of the field and turn onto the road that led into the center of Marjah, which lay some two kilometers beyond the poppy fields.

Every so often, Booth would lean back a little, opening a wider space between his eye and the scope as he took a puff on the cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds before letting it go with a long, tired sigh.

Although he'd given up smoking ages ago, Booth found relief in the diversion as he tried to forget the dream that had distracted his thoughts since the moment he woke up that morning.

He woke up covered in sweat, which by itself wasn't that unusual. The other men had warned him that the summer heat always peaked in August, seemingly as if it wanted to make its hateful presence known one last time before fading into the slow cooldown into Afghan autumn, and as usual, they were right.

But it wasn't just sweat that soaked his boxers and made the soft combed cotton stick to his groin. He awoke unable to remember all of the details of his dream, but as soon as he rolled over onto his back and stretched his arms out with a big yawn, he felt an awkward stickiness and knew that there must have been more to his dream than the one thing he remembered most clearly from it—kissing her in the rain in front of the Founding Fathers until the two of them were flushed, dazed and breathless.

Booth squeezed his eyes shut and quickly brought the cigarette to his lips, hoping that the smoke's stale, bitter taste would rid him of the memory of how she tasted, or that the firm pressure of the filter between his lips would make him forget the way her tongue licked between them as he slanted his mouth over hers and claimed it.

He shook his head, shrugging away the memory of desire as he snorted out a sharp stream of smoke and took another long drag.

"If I really mattered to her, she'd have written," he muttered, flicking the ash onto the floor next to his heel. The cigarette waggled loosely between his lips as he reached forward and turned one of the dials on his scope to increase the magnification while he watched a small, sun-faded Datsun pickup rumble along the edge of the fields towards Marjah. "But she didn't."

Bastone grunted, giving Booth an appraising look before nodding to himself. After taking a long, firm drag, he pulled the half-smoked Marlboro from his mouth, flicked the ash and stared at the tip as the bright orange faded a little. Turning the cigarette over in his hand, he bounced his head from one side to the other as he mentally juggled possible ways to reply.

"You write Parker once a week," he said, narrowing his eyes as he brought the dwindling stump of a cigarette back to his lips. "Right?"

"Mmm-hmmm," Booth replied, pulling away from the scope again as he took another puff on his own cigarette and shot his friend a suspicious look. "So what's your point?"

Bastone stood up abruptly and leaned over the machine gun to snuff out his weakly smoldering Marlboro against one of sandbags on the outside wall of the guard tower. He held the crushed butt between his fingers and stared at it for a moment, then dropped it into the makeshift ashtray one of the kid sergeants had made by slicing a soda can in half.

"How long's it take you to write one of those letters to your boy?" he asked, studying the poppy field through the binoculars as he waited for a reply.

Booth's eyes narrowed to dark slits as he grimaced in confusion. "What are you talking about?" he groused. "What's _that_ got to do with anything?"

Taking one last glance through the range-finding binoculars, Bastone chuckled under his breath as he set them on his lap, cocked his head to one side and regarded Booth with a faint grin.

"You can bang out one of those babies in five, ten minutes, tops," he said. "But those couple of letters you wrote to your partner, you agonized over those for, what—weeks?" He paused, noting that Booth had mounted a pair of flip-up night-vision sights on his helmet before retreating to the guard tower to brood. Clearly he'd intended to sit up there and sulk privately until well after nightfall.

"And then once you sat down to physically write one, how long did it actually take you to get the words down on paper? What? Two or three hours, right? And at least that first one, you must have gone through four drafts." Bastone remembered seeing Booth sitting Indian-style on his bunk with a clipboard in his lap and three crumpled-up wads of notebook paper laying on the floor at the foot of the bed.

Booth's jaw hardened and his nostrils flared as he stood up and kicked the chair back in frustration. "What's your point, Lou?" he snapped.

Undeterred and unintimidated by his taller, bulkier friend, Bastone's bushy black eyebrows arched over his calm, patient eyes. "Why did it take you so long to write those letters to her?" he asked. "You write your son twice a week, every week, and you can crank out those letters in minutes. So why'd it take so goddamn long to write those letters to her, pal?"

Booth took a step back, leaned his arm on the sandbag on the top of the wall and sighed. His gaze dropped to his feet. For a minute he just stared at his boots, scuffed and dusty as they were, their laces dotted with sand and loose dust that made the embossed letters on his dog tags harder to read. He reached for one of his water bottles, roughly unscrewing the cap and draining half of its contents in a single, long swig.

"Come on," Bastone pressed him, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the rosy glow of the setting sun as it hung over the horizon.

Booth's lower jaw shifted forward as he breathed a heavy, ragged sigh and snuffed out his cigarette, tossing it into the Coke can ashtray behind him. Though it unnerved him to admit it, the heady buzz of nicotine wasn't an entirely unwelcome sensation, especially after spending five months in a landlocked Muslim country, a thousand miles from the nearest can of ice-cold beer or bottle of single-malt scotch. He rubbed his fingers together as he contemplated whether to smoke another, wondering if one cigarette was enough to rekindle his long abandoned nicotine habit. He took a deep breath and finally looked up to meet Bastone's eyes.

"Because I didn't know what I wanted to say," he told him. "Or the right way to say the things I wanted to say. I've..." He swallowed hard. "I've said the wrong thing enough times already. More times than I can count."

A silence fell between the two as the pleasant afternoon breeze began to fade with the dying light.

Bastone watched Booth's expression as the latter stared out into the poppy fields, his jaw working from side to side as his warm brown eyes would narrow, then widen again.

He couldn't help but smile at the way the setting sun glanced off the pebbled, pockmarked skin on the back of Booth's clean-shaven jaw. Of all the men in the Alpha, the sergeant major was clearly the biggest beneficiary of General Stanley McChrystal's recent order that all Special Forces personnel embedded with the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police shave off their beards in order to present a more professional military appearance. Even after five months in-country, Booth's beard never fully filled in on the sides. The sparse brown scruff on his cheeks and the graying tufts on his chin had been a sorry excuse for a beard, enough so that some of the Afghan troops had taken to calling him _Wuzh_—the billy goat.

The late afternoon sun cast tiny shadows in the craggy scars along the edge of Booth's jaw. Bastone knew that his friend's body was dotted with other scars in a half-dozen other places—the starburst-shaped reminder of the small-caliber bullet that barely missed his subclavian artery, the half-dozen faint brown marks on his lower back, right thigh and ass-cheek from an Iraqi grenade, and a thumb-sized scar on his right hip from a childhood injury. But as he watched Booth's jaw grind in thought, Bastone knew that Booth's deepest scars weren't the ones that had cut and gouged his skin, but rather the ones that were invisible to the naked eye.

"From what you've told me," Bastone said thoughtfully, "Dr. Brennan's at least as uncomfortable talking about her feelings as you are." Booth's eyes flicked upward and met Bastone's. "She thinks everything through to the nth degree, right? She's not impulsive. She's careful. Cautious. Hmm?"

Booth grunted out a laugh. "Bones is probably the least spontaneous person on the planet," he said with a wry grin. "Most of the time, anyway."

"Exactly," Bastone said with a flash of his brows. "I bet you dimes to donuts she's got a stack of letters she's written you that she hasn't sent because she's as nervous about what to say to you as you are about what to say to her." He paused for a beat, then looked Booth straight in the eyes and said, "Just because she hasn't written doesn't mean she doesn't care. It probably means she's as bent around the fuckin' axle about it all as you are."

Booth nibbled on the inside of his lip as he thought about it. After a minute, he sighed and nodded.

"I guess you're probably right," he said with a shrug.

"Mmm-hmm." Bastone cocked one black brow and smirked. "Could you repeat that?" he asked. "I didn't quite catch that."

Booth rolled his eyes. "Fuck you, Bastone."

"Yeah? Fuck you, too, Booth."

The pair fell silent again as Bastone lit another cigarette and settled back into his chair behind the Mark 48 machine gun. Booth declined the offer of another with a wave of his hand, the bitter, pasty dryness in his mouth reminding him why he gave up smoking years ago when he first became a Ranger. For several minutes the two of them sat behind their respective weapons, quietly observing the poppy fields and the dusty provincial roads that hemmed them in. Finally, as the bright orange sun began to slip below the horizon, Bastone snuffed out his cigarette and reached into the thigh pocket of his fatigues.

"What's that?" Booth asked, setting his binoculars on his knee as he watched Bastone unfurl two crumpled pieces of paper he'd folded into eighths to fit into his pocket. A wide smile spread across Bastone's face as he glanced down at the pages, giving them each a long look before handing them over to Booth.

"Just got this today from Darleen," he said with a big, round-cheeked grin. "It's her thirty-two week ultrasound."

Booth held the print-out gingerly as his eyes roamed the golden-brown image, laughing as he considered how much more detailed the 3D ultrasound was compared to the blurry, abstract-looking ultrasounds Rebecca had with Parker more than a decade ago.

"She's beautiful," he said, his voice soft and faintly wistful as his finger hovered over the image of the chubby-cheeked fetus. "God, you can even see her cute little nose. And her pretty little eyelids. Wow. She's amazing." He gave the image one last look before turning to the second page, which showed the child from a slightly different angle. "Aww," Booth cooed, pouting his lips a little as he brushed his fingertip over the baby's forehead. "Look. She's sucking her thumb. That little wrist. Those little fingers. She's beautiful."

Bastone beamed. "Yeah, isn't she great?" Booth handed the ultrasound images back. "She's thirty-four weeks now," Bastone said as he carefully folded up the pictures and slid them back into his thigh pocket. "Just six more weeks to go."

"You guys figured out a name yet?" Booth asked.

Bastone's dark eyes flickered as he bit back a smile. "We're still working on that," he said. "I've got some ideas but I haven't completely sold the missus on 'em yet."

Booth laughed. "I'm not sure I want to ask," he snickered. His expression suddenly turned serious as he sighed and added, "The captain and I are still working on trying to get you back there for midterm leave first week of October. Her due date's the first, right? With any luck, if you're not there in time for the delivery, you'll be there right afterwards. We're still waiting to get confirmation back from 3rd Battalion, but the captain and I are giving it a full court press, so it's lookin' pretty good."

"Thanks, pal." Bastone patted his thigh pocket just to hear the reassuring crinkle of the paper inside, then looked up. "What about you, though?" he asked. "I mean, you're due some mid-tour R&R, too. So you can go back and see your boy."

Booth shook his head. "No," he said. "Look, I don't take mine until the last one of you guys goes home for yours. You, Parnell, Swann and Lukas all need to get home and back before I take mine. It's okay. With any luck I'll get mine in time to catch Parker during his Thanksgiving break. We'll see."

"That'd be nice."

"Yeah," Booth murmured as they both turned their gaze to the western horizon where the shimmering orange sun continued its downward slide into twilight. After a minute, Booth turned back to Bastone and snapped his fingers. "Hey," he said with a grin. "I almost forgot. Got Parker's school picture last week. Wanna see?"

Bastone arched a brow and smiled. "Sure, but only 'cause I remember him bein' better-lookin' than his dad," he said as he watched Booth dig into his pocket for the picture. "Seems that those ugly-ass Booth genes are recessive," he added as he reached for the photo.

Booth narrowed his eyes and hesitated before handing over the picture. "You really are a fucking asshole, you know that?"

"Yup," Bastone said. "That's why you and me get along so famously, you fuckin' putz. Now hand over that picture so we can see if your boy won the genetic lottery after all, or if the poor kid's gonna be stuck with your ugly mug."

"You must be really great in the sack," Booth said with a snort as he passed him the photo. "Because I can't imagine Darleen putting up with you just on account of your personality. Yeah, I'm guessin', with that big mouth of yours, you must be pretty good with your tongue."

"Wouldn't you like to find out?" Bastone retorted, holding Parker's photo up to the fading light.

"Maybe later," Booth mumbled. Bastone's eyes flashed with amusement as he made a juicy kissing sound with his lips.

Then they both laughed.

* * *

**A/N:** _Ahh, Boostone. Aren't they great? It's really not that hard to write Booth with a friend. I'm not sure why the show's writers have failed so epically in that department. I sure as hell think the man has friends and we deserve to see him pal around with a buddy. In any event, as is often the case in fanfiction, the show's oversights can be easily corrected. I've taken upon myself the solemn duty of showing what a Boothy friendship outside the context of the Jeffersonian/FBI might look like._

_So what did you think? Don't leave me guessing. Leave me a review instead. Please? Pretty please?_

**Editorial notes:** _Again, thanks to the incomparable _**FauxMaven **_for her beta'ing brilliance. Also, one of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's first acts when he took over as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in summer 2010 was to require all U.S. Army Special Forces assigned to work with ANA and Afghan National Police forces to shave their beards. Seriously. Look it up._


	10. Reunion

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**Chapter 10: Reunion**

* * *

Booth never actually saw her eyes that day.

When the shooting finally stopped and the crackle of small-arms fire faded, the eerie quiet of the street was immediately shattered by the sound of crying. The woman had been shielding her son's tiny body with her own, but once the guns fell silent, the boy squirmed from beneath her arms and hunched shoulders, whimpering as he struggled to free himself from her suffocating embrace.

Her face was twisted in agony as she clawed her fingers in the sand, releasing the boy as she reached back for her leg. Her hand touched her bleeding thigh for only a second before the boy crawled to her, leaning over her prone form and wrapping his small arms around her waist.

The medics—Hackett and Swann—slung their rifles behind their backs and ran to her, dropping to their knees in the loose, billowing dust as they ripped open the Velcro flaps on their medical kits. Swann gently peeled the boy off his mother and pushed him away so they could access her wounds. Booth quickly scooped the boy into his arms and began speaking to him in a low, soothing voice.

_"Your momma's gonna be okay,"_ he'd told the crying boy, knowing that the Pashtun child had no idea what he was saying but hoping that the deep murmur of his voice alone would offer some comfort. _"Everything's gonna be okay, buddy. We're gonna get your momma all fixed up." _He stroked his gloved hand over the boy's soft, tousled hair, frowning when he felt the the woman's blood as a tacky smear on the pad of his bare trigger finger. _"Shhhh," _he whispered. _"Shhhh. It's gonna be okay." _

He looked over and saw Swann pulling the woman's dress up to expose her bloodied calf and thigh. Booth knew how excruciating her pain was by the fact that she didn't protest having her body publicly exposed to the eyes and hands of two male strangers, something that under normal circumstances would have been a source of deep shame. She let the American soldiers touch her ankle, the back of her knee and the inside of her thigh, exposing her most intimate places to their view as they applied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, but not once did she flinch.

Five weeks went by before Booth saw them again. That afternoon, the woman and the boy were doing exactly the same thing they had been doing the day she was shot—fetching water at the canal. August had given way to September and the days were beginning to shorten, and the sun cast long shadows on the street as the pair shuffled their sandaled feet across the pale, dusty road.

Her face had been partly obscured by the black _hijāb_ that covered her hair and neck. Like all of the women in Helmand Province, she covered herself for modesty, but unlike those who wore the face-covering _niqāb_ or the complete cover of the _burqa_, her headscarf left most of her face open to view as Booth passed by with the rest of the patrol.

He'd just rounded the corner, emerging from a shadowed alleyway and onto the main road when he saw her. Her long green dress was dotted with tiny red rosettes and hung loosely from her shoulders, revealing her to be a slightly-built woman with slender wrists and small, rounded shoulders. When he first saw her, his attention was drawn less to her and more to the unnerving fact that her head was turned and her gaze focused intently on something behind her.

Truth be told, had she been standing there by herself, Booth might not have recognized her. His eyes and mind were focused on the shadows in the alleys between the building blocks and on the spaces between the reeds lining the canal that the insurgents favored for ambushes. Like windows, rooftops, piles of trash and baskets in front of houses, any space Booth couldn't see into was a potential hiding place for death.

Although ten years with the FBI had proved again and again that the eyes were the window to the soul, when he was out on foot patrol with his men, he seldom looked into the eyes of the people they passed along the way. Most days, he was too busy surveying his surroundings for hints of recently-laid IEDs or sniper lookouts to make eye contact with local passers-by. He'd watched too many men shot and torn apart by hidden explosives to be anything but completely vigilant when he took his men "outside of the wire."

Something in that particular moment, however, tugged at his sixth sense and made the hair on the back of Booth's neck stand up. His firm, booted footsteps slowed and his heart begin to race as his eyes swiveled to follow her gaze.

Conditioned to a twitchy wariness after nearly six months in-country, Booth instinctively tightened his fingers around the pistol grip of his Mark 12, holding his index finger flush against the action above the trigger assembly as he slowly raised the rifle. He scanned the street behind her, his ungloved finger ready to slide over the trigger to neutralize whatever threat his keen eyes found lurking behind her.

That's when Booth saw him.

Every one of his muscles crackled with the energy of awareness as his gaze swept along the street and settled on the figure of a four year-old boy with a soft, toothy smile and familiar hazel eyes. The boy's skipping gait suddenly stopped as the child froze and stared at the tall, broad-shouldered American soldier standing by the side of the road. Booth's breath caught in his throat as he and the boy simply looked at one another for several long seconds.

The two Afghan troops who were walking point on the patrol heard the boots behind them fall silent and they, too, ceased their advance and turned around.

_"Adeh," _the boy said as he tore his gaze away from Booth and ran towards his mother. The boy mumbled something else to her that would have been near-impossible for Booth to decipher anyway given his limited Pashto vocabulary but which was completely unintelligible in the boy's small, clipped, half-swallowed voice. The only word Booth could pick out was the one the boy repeated almost as a mantra as he looked to her with arched, pleading brows. "_Adeh_, _Adeh_..." The boy's soft, small voice tugged at something in the pit of Booth's belly as he approached. _"Adeh!"_

_Momma. _

The woman set the red plastic water jug on the ground and extended her arm, summoning the boy to her side with a wave of her hand as she finally turned to face the soldiers.

That's when Booth saw her eyes.

The pale gray-green hue of the Pashtun woman's sharp, piercing gaze took his breath away. Their shimmering color—almost exactly the same as his partner's—struck him as both hauntingly familiar and puzzlingly alien while he stared at her for a long gut-swirling moment that made his knees wobble a little as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He swallowed hard and looked away as he tried to regain his bearings, and as his eyes swept groundward, he saw her hug the boy against her hip with one hand as she leaned onto a gnarled, hand-carved cane gripped tightly with her other hand.

Booth looked at the doe-eyed boy who acknowledged him with a soft, demure smile that lasted only fractions of a second before he turned away and nuzzled into his mother's skirts. Glancing up at the young woman, he raised his brows and silently asked permission to approach.

The woman's pale eyes narrowed as she hesitated, then looked down at her son as the little boy fisted her skirt and gave it a demanding tug. She cupped his head with her hand and smoothed his ruffled hair with her long, slender fingers as she and Booth exchanged vague smiles.

Booth grabbed the nylon sling that held his rifle snug against his chest and yanked it around so the rifle hung across his back, muzzle down, then pulled off his gloves and squatted in front of the boy. The two Afghan soldiers that had been leading the patrol stood a few feet behind the boy and his mother, watching intently as Booth pulled off his red-mirrored Oakleys and tucked them into one of the webbing straps on his armored vest.

"Hey," he said to the boy, his voice low and soft as the boy slowly peeked from behind a fold of his mother's skirt. Booth couldn't help but smile at the boy, relieved to see a faint grin on the child's lips even as the memory of the boy's terrified cries echoed clearly in his mind. Pointing to the name tape sewn onto the right side of his body armor, he smiled warmly and said, "Booth. My name is Booth." The boy's dark brown eyebrows scrunched over his hazel eyes as Booth gently pointed at the boy's chest. "_Zamah num _Booth_ dai. _What is your name?" he asked. _"Stahso num tseh dai?"_

The boy blushed and gripped his mother's skirt more tightly in his tiny fist as he looked up at her. She closed her eyes and nodded approvingly, gently patting him on the head as she pursed her lips and studied Booth for a moment.

The boy watched the silent exchange between his mother and the big, dark-eyed American soldier but still hesitated, pulling her skirt over his mouth and nose. Booth chuckled and remembered how his own son had a shy phase around the same age. After an encouraging nudge from his _adeh_, the boy's long, dark lashes fluttered and he loosened his grip on her skirt. _"Zamah num _Hamid_ dai," _he said, averting his gaze as he spoke.

_"Khushala shwum pah li do di," _Booth replied. "Nice to meet you, Hamid."

Hamid nodded, his dirty cheeks flushing as he fussed with his _kamiz, _a traditional Afghan tunic that hung down to his knees. He kneaded the homespun wool fabric between his fingers as he kicked nervously at the dirt with the toe of his sandal.

The boy's chubby, rosy cheeks and silky, wavy hair reminded Booth of Parker, which made him feel a warm, chest-filling affection for the young Pashtun.

"Hey Hamid," he said, tucking his gloves under his arm and peeling open the Velcro flap of his thigh pocket. The boy's soft hazel widened at hearing his name. Booth looked up at one of the Afghan soldiers standing a couple of feet behind Hamid and his mother. "Tell him I have a son of my own," he told the soldier, who blinked in surprise but quickly translated. Hamid ceased his fidgeting and brought his gaze up to meet Booth's.

"Do you like soccer?" Booth asked the boy, giving the ANA trooper a moment to translate. Hamid's eyes brightened and he nodded, drawing a smile from Booth, who knew better than to expect a spoken reply. "My son, Parker, loves soccer," he continued. "He plays on a team at home where we live."

Booth dug into his pocket, rummaging around a bit before he pulled his hand out and looked into the boy's chestnut-colored eyes.

"This is his favorite soccer player," he told Hamid, holding up a trading card with a photograph on one side and scoring statistics on the other. The Afghan soldier quickly translated. "Jaime Moreno." Booth passed the card to the boy, who accepted it with both hands as a wide smile spread across his face. "Maybe I can watch _you_ play soccer sometime," he said, reaching up and gently patting the side of the boy's arm.

Hamid held the card like it was a treasure and beamed. His mother ruffled his hair and said something to him in their tongue, nudging his shoulder. The boy looked up at her with his brows raised in what Booth instantly recognized as the universal expression that begged, _"Do I have to, Mom?" _Her eyes narrowed sternly as she nodded.

"_Manana," _Hamid murmured, his dirt-streaked cheeks blushing as he thanked the burly American who crouched before him at eye-level.

"_Har kala rasha, _Hamid," Booth replied, grinning at the boy's mother as he grunted quietly and stood up to his full height.

"You have a great boy, ma'am," he told her, nodding at the ANA trooper to ensure his compliment was translated for her.

She acknowledged him with a polite nod, tapping her son on the shoulder to get his attention, then patted his arm, prodding him to begin walking so she could shepherd him back to their home. She leaned over to pick up the heavy plastic can of water, then hesitated for a moment as her eyes met those of the pale-eyed, freckle-cheeked young soldier standing behind Booth.

"_Tashakor," _she said to Swann, the glimmer in her gray-green eyes leaving the young Iowan with little doubt that she would never forget him or his comrade who saved her life not a quarter mile from where she stood.

"_Har kala rasha," _the young medic replied with a smile, bringing his hand up to the brim of his Kevlar helmet as if he could tip it like a cap. "You're welcome, ma'am."

Hamid's mother looked at Booth and Swann as she considered whether to say more, and was about to speak when her son's excited voice called to her from halfway down the block.

"_Adeh!" _he yelled to her. _"Djar sah!"_

Booth couldn't help but laugh at hearing the boy holler one of the phrases he heard most often from the ANAs, recalling the unrelenting impatience of his own son when he was Hamid's age. _"Hurry up, Daddy!" _he remembered Parker telling him one afternoon when they were at the National Zoo as Booth lingered too long in front of the lions. He took a deep breath and blinked away the memory as he pulled his tactical gloves back on and slid his rifle back around to rest snugly against his chest again.

"_Adeh!" _the boy bellowed. The young woman smiled at the soldiers one last time and shrugged, then turned away and began to make her way down the block as quickly as she could, leaning into her cane with each labored step.

Booth reached into his thigh pocket as he watched her slowly walk away, checking to make sure his son's last letter was secure before patting the Velcro flap closed. He wondered what Parker would think when he told him what became of the Jaime Moreno trading card he sent with his letter to signify his birthday gift to his father—a promise that the two would go to see DC United play at RFK Stadium when Booth got back from Afghanistan in the spring.

_Someday, _Booth thought with a quiet sigh as he watched Hamid and his mother disappear down a side street. Someday he would tell his son about what happened to him here, and the people he met in this place. _Someday, I'll help you understand._

* * *

**A/N:** _This chapter wasn't the one I originally intended to be Chapter 10, but I woke up the other day and my muse was babbling noisily and flooding my brain with images of Booth running into the woman and her child, weeks after the firefight that wounded her. Slave as I am to my muse, I quickly gave in and wrote this chapter, from start to finish, in a single day. It's a little different in feel/tone from most of the other FMR vignettes, but I hope you liked it anyway. Please, don't keep me guessing. Drop me a little note to let me know what you thought of this. Consider leaving a review._

**Editorial note:** _Once again, thanks to the one and only _**FauxMaven**_ for taking the time and trouble to beta this chapter for me. Also, the image I woke up with in my mind's eye as I began to write this chapter is a very famous one. Do a Google search for "Afghan Girl 1984" and you'll pull up an amazing photograph of a twelve year-old Afghan girl, Sharbat Gula, who was photographed in 1984 at a refugee camp in Pakistan. Gula had fled Afghanistan with her siblings and her grandmother after both of her parents were killed when the Soviets attacked their village with helicopter gunships. National Geographic, which published the photo, tracked her down in 2002 and did a feature on her life, which is worth the read. _

_Thanks for reading!_


	11. Overwatch

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**Chapter 11: Overwatch**

* * *

"_There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."_

―Ernest Hemingway

* * *

Booth sat on Dawson's foot locker in the junior enlisted barracks with his M25 sniper rifle tucked between his knees while his other weapon, the smaller and lighter Mark 12, lay nearby, leaning against the side of the plastic trunk. A twenty-round magazine lay next to his thigh, its shiny brass-cased ammunition reflecting the dull white light cast by the bare bulb over his head.

Swann and Hackett sat on their foot lockers a few feet away, each of them hunching over Makovsky's trunk which they were using as a makeshift card table.

Booth reached for his cleaning kit and pulled out a small cloth patch, quickly glancing at the two kid sergeants before squeezing a half-dozen drops of solvent onto the patch. Once satisfied that the patch was sufficiently soaked, he threaded the square piece through the half-inch long eye at the end of his cleaning rod. He licked his chapped lips as was his nervous habit and held his tongue between his lips as he carefully inserted the rod into the muzzle of the rifle. He pulled it out again with a quiet grunt, frowning a little at the dark smear of propellant that soiled the patch, then repeated the process several times with freshly oiled patches until the last patch came up clean.

The barrel of the Mark 12 had been dirtier than the M25, having seen ten times as many rounds fired out of it since its last cleaning, but the custom-built M25 was a more precise weapon, and considerably less forgiving of poor maintenance. Though he'd only fired three rounds out of the M25 that day, he sat down immediately after his team came back from their patrol to begin cleaning it.

Booth tried to clear his mind as he swabbed down the bore of his Mark 12, pushing away the memories of that day's events as he listened to Swann and Hackett chit-chat over their game of head's up five-card draw. After a few minutes of observing Booth's suspicious silence, Swann turned and look at his elder "battle buddy," but Booth quickly averted his eyes, instead studying the bore light he shined into the Mark 12's barrel to confirm it reflected back clean and bright. The sandy-haired Iowan looked at Hackett with a silent shrug and began to deal another hand.

Booth looked at the small pile of soiled, crumpled patches laying at his feet, then turned his hand over, grimacing at the dark smudges left on his fingertips after cleaning his two rifles.

Booth winced as he remembered seeing the young Pashtun corporal fall face-first into the sand before hearing the shot that killed him. The twelve men on the patrol had immediately scattered, taking cover against a pockmarked stone wall behind a house opposite from the where Corporal Turanlay unmoving on the blood-soaked sand. A few minutes later, they lured the impatient Taliban sniper into taking another shot, enabling Booth to confirm his location by watching for the muzzle flash. The insurgent sniper's second shot was his last.

Rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, Booth breathed a small sigh, knowing that there was no solvent on earth that would ever completely remove the residue he felt inside after taking life. He squeezed his eyes shut and grunted quietly, then opened them again and set the cleaning tools to the side. He picked up the Mark 12 by the pistol grip, thumbed off the safety and turned the selector switch to semiautomatic, then pulled the trigger and held it as he pulled the charging handle to cock the weapon, then released the trigger with a click. Booth did this several times to ensure the weapon was functioning properly, then reset the safety, shoved the magazine into its seat on the underside of the rifle and checked the safety again. He set the newly cleaned, lubricated weapon to the side as he began to round up the various tools in his cleaning kit and tucked each item into its assigned place.

"What's that?" he heard Swann ask Hackett. The query drew Booth's attention to the pair as he plucked a small, soft-bristled brush and a microfiber cloth from the zippered nylon pouch. "On your bunk, I mean," Swann clarified, gesturing toward Hackett's bed with a soft jerk of his chin.

Hackett glanced over his shoulder. "Oh," he said with a grin. "I asked my brother to send me that. It's an ASU course catalog."

"A catalog?" Swann's brows furrowed in confusion. "But, wait—your ETS date isn't until next September, right?" he asked. "That's like, a year from now, dude."

Booth's eyes narrowed when he heard reference to Hackett's Expiration of Term of Service (ETS) date, the day on which the young medic's active-duty enlistment ran out and he was to be discharged back into civilian life. He reached into his pack and pulled out a small bottle of antibacterial gel, squirted it on his hands, then rubbed them together as he continued to listen to the kid sergeants.

"I know, duh," Hackett retorted with a roll of his eyes. "But I'm just…" He hesitated for a moment. "I'm just thinkin', you know, about what I maybe want to do...when I get out. I mean, if I ETS in September 2011, assuming they don't stop-loss me and keep my ass in involuntarily, that means I can maybe start classes that next January. I've got some transfer credits from those online courses I've been taking. Just twelve, but that's about a semester's worth. Better than nothing."

"How many?" Swann asked, then grinned as he realized why his comrade was giving him a nonplussed look. "Cards, I mean. How many do you want?"

Hackett laughed. "Two," he said. Swann smirked and dealt the Arizonan a pair of cards to replace the two he'd laid face-down on the foot locker. Swann dealt himself two more cards to replace the ones he had discarded, then set the deck on the table and fanned the cards in his hand to inspect them.

"What about you?" Hackett asked. "You're ETS'ing right after we get back, aren't you?"

"Yeah," Swann admitted. "April, but—look, I don't think me and college are made for each other. Besides, me and Sarah are gonna get married, and I got a job waitin' for me back in Dubuque."

Booth flipped up the lens covers on each end his Mark 12's scope and carefully dusted the lenses with the soft-bristled brush. His eyes swung over to the two kid sergeants and he peered at them from underneath his heavily furrowed brow.

"You should still go to school," he said, quickly bringing his gaze back to his rifle scope as he gently wiped the lenses with the microfiber cloth.

Swann and Hackett looked up from their cards and turned to look at him with surprise in their eyes.

Without looking up, Booth added, "Even if it's just an accounting class at the local junior college so you can help your dad keep better books at the dealership. Come on—think of all the training you've done in the Army."

Swann grimaced. "That's different, though," he said with a sigh. "I mean, when I get home, I'm gonna have responsibilities. To Sarah, to my family, you know, and—"

"Even more reason to get an education," Booth interrupted, flipping the plastic covers over the scope lenses with an audible _snap. _He set the Mark 12 to the side, carefully leaning it against the side of the foot locker as he reached for the M25 again. Laying the heavier sniper rifle across his lap, he glanced up and gave Swann and Hackett both a long, appraising look. After a moment, he turned to Swann and said, "You owe it to yourself and to your family, including Sarah, to get an education."

Seeing a latent objection in the deep breath the young Iowan drew, Booth flipped open the lenses on the M25 and dusted them off with his brush.

"I'm not saying you have to go get a four-year degree," he said. "But maybe you will. Don't close any doors, though. You never know."

Swann gave his cards one last cursory look and set them down on the foot locker he and Hackett were using as a table. He reached his arm around and scratched his back, which was damp with sweat after their long midday foot patrol under the sizzling September sun.

"I dunno," he sighed. "I'm not sure how I'm supposed to go to school while working and with a wife..." A wide grin spread across Swann's face, the same way it had every week at mail call when he nearly threw himself at Warrant Officer Sivick when his name was called.

Hackett looked up from his own cards and bit back an amused look smile as he watched Swann's eyes flicker with love as he spoke dreamily of his near-fiancée. _Engaged to be engaged, _Booth said once in reference to Swann and his beloved girlfriend. Glancing over at the sergeant major, Hackett caught Booth staring at Swann's back, which was peppered with a dozen slightly-raised, faint brown scars from a run-in with an IED in Iraq.

"Call," Hackett blurted out awkwardly as he turned his cards over. "Check it out. Two pair—fours and jacks."

Swann ceased his nervous scratching and reached for his own cards, flipping them over with a _pffft_ as the cards made a snapping sound against the makeshift table. "Full house, baby," he announced with a snicker. "Eights and sixes. I win. That's two outta three, bro."

Hackett groaned. "Let's make it best of five and up the ante," he said. "Loser cleans the other guy's kit for a week, uh?"

"Bring it," Swann replied, arching his brow as he swiped his hand across the foot locker and gathered up the cards for a new shuffle. "Best get your three-in-one oil ready, my friend. You're goin' down."

"Keep talkin'," Hackett said, snapping his fingers and making circular gestures in the air with his index finger. "Just fucking deal the cards already."

Booth watched as Swann cut the deck in two, pulled the halves back and riffled them into a stack, then repeated the shuffle. He tapped the whole deck on the edge of the foot locker to even them up, then dealt Hackett and himself five cards each.

"You can do it while you work," Booth said, picking up the conversation where they left off a minute ago. "And being married's no excuse." He fell silent for a moment and nibbled the inside of his lip between his teeth as he gave the M25's lenses a couple of more strokes with the optics brush. "You're both a lot smarter and better with computers and shit than I am. If I can do it, you can do it."

Swann set the deck on the top of the trunk and fanned his cards in his hand, then shook his head and sighed as he glanced over at Booth. "I dunno," he grumbled.

"Listen," Booth said, quickly wiping the sniper rifle scope clean with the microfiber cloth before snapping the lens covers closed. "You don't have to do it all at once. You can do it a little bit at a time until you finish. Hell, I started college in the fall of 1988 and didn't finish my degree until the spring of 2000. What's that? Twelve years?"

Hackett and Swann each lowered their cards to their laps and looked at Booth. "Really?" Swann said, tipping up the bill of his patrol cap, his sandy brows knitting over his pale blue eyes as he considered Booth's revelation.

"Yeah," Booth said, his mouth curving into a crooked grin as he met the two staff sergeants' expectant gazes. "I did two semesters at Penn State before I dropped out in the spring of '89. I shipped off to basic in June that year. But I didn't just sit on my ass. One of the first things I did when I got to Fort Campbell that fall was sign up for a college course that I could do by correspondence—back then, there was no internet so it was all by mail. I did one course at a time, two or three of them per year, so that by the time I finally got out of the Army in '99, I'd cobbled together sixty semester hours of credit, plus the thirty I had from Penn State. I got out, moved down to D.C. and knocked out the last year at the University of Maryland, College Park. That's how I got my criminal justice degree."

Swann shook his head. "But you did two years full-time," he said, yanking his cap off and rubbing the sweat out of his sandy, close-trimmed hair. "You were able to focus on school. I just—"

"No," Booth said, cutting him off as he lifted the eleven-pound rifle off his lap, checked the safety and shoved the magazine into the bottom of the action. "First year—when I was at Penn State—I was a scholarship athlete and had to balance practice, travel to games, playing, _and _my schoolwork. Then…" He pulled back the cocking handle to close the weapon's bolt with a loud _clack_. "That last year I did at Maryland…" Booth gave the rifle a quick visual once-over and set it to the side next to the Mark 12. "I had a pregnant ex-girlfriend the first semester, a part-time job to help defray her expenses as well as my own, plus one weekend a month of Reserve drill. I was in the middle of Annual Training with the 310th Military Intelligence Battalion at Fort Meade when my son was born."

For a few moments, Booth fell silent, remembering the afternoon his pager went off and how he went AWOL over his lunch hour four days into his annual two-week drill, speeding his way down I-295 from Fort Meade to George Washington University Medical Center. The Army sent Walter Sherman and a pair of MPs up to GW to retrieve him, but instead of subjecting Booth to an Article 32 hearing and a general court martial, Booth's battalion commander agreed to give him a written reprimand and have him transferred from the drilling Reserve to the non-drilling Individual Ready Reserve after Booth disclosed that he was trying to finish up his last semester of college so he could join the FBI.

Booth smiled at the memory, reminding himself that it was sometimes better to be lucky than good, especially where the brass are concerned.

"And I did that last semester while working part-time and taking care of my infant son three mornings a week so my ex-girlfriend could work at the legal aid clinic at Georgetown Law," he said. "So, it can be done. It might take you twelve years like it did me, but if you set your mind to it, you can do it. You just got take it piece by piece, bit by bit, just like anything else."

Swann and Hackett sat around their makeshift card table and just looked at one another, each of them a bit stunned at the sudden gush of personal information from their normally-guarded NCOIC. After a minute, Swann reached into his thigh pocket and pulled out a cigarette, which he'd just slipped into his mouth to light when the barracks door swung open.

"Fuckin' figures I'd find you schmucks lollygaggin' around," came Bastone's sarcastic, edgy New York voice as he barged into the barracks with Lukas, Kennedy and Makovsky on his heels. "You best not be lettin' Booth play," he added, peeling his tactical pack off his shoulders and letting it fall to the floor as he reached into his pocket for a cigarette. "I hear he cheats…"

Booth zipped his cleaning kit shut and rolled his eyes as he tucked the grapefruit-sized pouch into his "go" pack. He turned his wrist to look at his watch, then lazily looked up at his friend, whose dark, laughing eyes were concealed behind a winding pillar of cigarette smoke.

"Oh yeah?" Booth retorted. "Fuck you, Bastone."

Bastone winked and blew Booth an air kiss as the kid sergeants dissolved into laughter.

* * *

**A/N: **_I think Booth's biggest value as a leader, whether in the Army or in the FBI (and, while the show doesn't let us see much of Booth-the-leader, in my mind, it's clear he is a born leader), is his ability to mentor young men and women and give them the benefit of the long, hard road he traveled to get where he is. Hopefully that side of him shows through in these FMR pieces._

_Let me know what you thought of that one, and this collection in general. And if you haven't seen it, I have a new piece that's begun posting called "More Than One Kind," which is a sort of sequel to "Killing Two Birds" that answers the question, 'What happened to Lou Bastone's family after the end of K2B?' So, wander over and take a peek if you're interested. It's an emotional piece, but one I think you'll enjoy._

**Editorial note: **_Yet again, huge and effusive thanks to my friend _**FauxMaven**_ for her keen eye and beta-reading assistance. She helped me choose a title for this chapter and furnished the wonderful Hemingway quote that appears at the beginning. Thanks, FM! _


	12. Easter

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

* * *

**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**Chapter 12: Easter**

* * *

As soon as Swann pulled the Humvee up next to the other two Alpha trucks at the edge of the motor pool and threw the vehicle into park, Booth climbed out with a relieved grunt, unbuckling his chinstrap as he yanked his helmet off.

_Thank the fucking Lord, _he thought as he ripped open the Velcro and peeled off his body armor. The heavy pouches containing ammunition, a handheld wideband radio, a basic medical kit and other supplies hung awkwardly from the vest as he heaved it into the backseat where the team stashed all of their gear (except their rifles).

Booth was relieved to finally be back "inside the wire" again after a bumpy and nerve-wracking ride from FOB Crossbow on the opposite end of the Marjah district. He had helped Captain Torres broker a deal with Crossbow's other Special Forces detachment whereby Alpha 3623 would spend all of Easter Sunday at Camp Marjah in exchange for letting the men of the other Alpha team spend both Good Friday and Easter Monday there. All in all, Booth decided, it was a fair trade, since it enabled the men of the Alpha to attend Easter services on Easter, even if it meant doing two-a-day patrols on Friday and Monday to make up for it.

Camp Marjah was the largest NATO base in the sector, housing over 1,000 U.S. Marines in addition to serving as a supply hub for a half-dozen smaller NATO installations in the area. Booth noted that the facilities at Camp Marjah were a vast improvement over the smaller Camp Davis, which housed some 600 Marines about six kilometers from the Alpha's previous billet at FOB Maddox on the outskirts of Qūryah.

_No matter what they say, _he observed with a grin, _size really does matter._

Spending Easter at Camp Marjah meant that the men of the Alpha would get a hot holiday meal with all the trimmings (including fresh-baked pie for dessert) prepared by cooks from a Marine support company, served on plates and eaten at actual tables. It also meant that both the Protestant and Catholic members of the team would get to attend services. Makovsky, the lone Eastern Orthodox soldier in the unit, decided to attend the Protestant service with the other kid sergeants (Swann, Lukas and Hackett) and Parnell while Booth, Bastone, Kennedy and Captain Torres attended a Catholic Mass led by a priest from the Diocese of Philadelphia who moonlighted as a captain in the Army Reserves.

Booth left the Mass feeling a little less bitter than when he took his seat on the wooden bench and shrugged off the sticky sensation from the sweat that soaked his uniform under the body armor he wore on the ride in from FOB Crossbow. The very idea of dressing for church by peeling off a heavy ballistic vest with ceramic armor plates and pouches full of ammo made him nauseous.

He yearned to be where he usually was on Easter Sunday: at D.C.'s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle (patron saint of civil servants) with his son, each of them crisply dressed in their best suits and brand-new ties, practicing their own Booth Easter tradition. Instead, he was stuck in the middle of a Marine base in a remote district of southern Helmand province, taking Easter Communion in a makeshift tent chapel with a handful of other soldiers and a hundred young Marines, enjoying a one-day respite from the endless grind of an anti-insurgency campaign.

A song lyric flashed into his mind as he stood in line to receive Communion.

_"Early morning, April four_  
_A shot rang out in the Memphis sky..."_

He wondered if there was some cosmic significance to being deployed overseas as an Army sniper the year that Christ's resurrection was celebrated on the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, who died by a sniper's bullet.

Shrugging away the thought, Booth stepped forward and closed his eyes as the chaplain smiled and said, "The Body of Christ."

"Amen," Booth whispered piously as the chaplain gently placed the wafer on his tongue. He felt a faint pulse of warmth in his chest as he tried to focus his thoughts, not on how far away from home he was or the awful series of missteps that led him to Helmand, but rather on Jesus Christ and the sacrifice He made of His Body and Blood, and of the redemptive power of His grace.

Booth was standing outside of the chapel tent gazing distractedly at the clouds when Bastone approached from behind and nudged him in the arm.

"Hey," Bastone said, raising a single bushy eyebrow as he studied his friend's tense, angry posture. "You okay, buddy?" he asked.

The question itself seemed to erode some of the comfort Booth had gained from the Eucharist service. A heavy sigh rattled low in his throat as he glanced skyward once, then shook his head and shrugged.

"I'm fine," he said, a faint waver in his deep voice belying the truth of his assurance. After a moment of pregnant pause, he turned to Bastone and sighed again. "I just…" He reached up and tugged at his rifle sling, hitching it more snugly against his shoulder, then looked down at his feet, kicking at the sand with his booted toe. "I always take Parker to Easter Sunday Mass," he said glumly. "I usually have to split spring break with Rebecca, but I always get him all of Easter weekend, starting with Good Friday. We go to church on Friday and Sunday, but then the rest of the weekend's ours—just me and him. I'm not there, and, well, I just feel pretty fucking far from home right now."

For a minute, Bastone didn't say anything. He just stood there in front of the chapel with his arms crossed and his own rifle strapped across his back. Accustomed by now to the cycle of his friend's brooding moods, Bastone lazily stroked his beard and watched Booth's nostrils flare and his lips curl then purse again as he mentally chewed on his misery.

"But, fuck, why am I telling you this?" Booth asked, his dark, heavy brow sloped low over his eyes as he clenched his hands into fists and stuffed them into his pockets. "I mean, shit, it's not like I'm the only guy around here missing his family. Every soldier and Marine here is missing home. I'm just…" He felt the anger simmering inside of him—anger at being where he was, and not where he belonged, and anger at not being able to explain exactly why he felt so angry.

"Look," Bastone said. "Maybe it's 'cause it's been awhile since you've deployed and missed a holiday with your boy." He watched Booth's jaw muscle tick beneath the dark brown scruff, then looked away as he sensed something more than simple homesickness in the frustration that seemed to roll off of Booth in waves. "Or…" He hesitated for a moment as he turned and saw Booth's eyes narrow and blink. "Or maybe it's because you don't see enough of your boy back home," he said, his words coming carefully and evenly as he watched his friend's head slowly turn to face him. "You see so little of him as it is, that missing your special times with him is that much harder to take."

Booth's brown eyes flashed with anguish for the seconds he held Bastone's gaze, then he turned away, shaking his head with a heavy sigh.

Bastone stood there in silence, his lips parted as he wracked his brain in search of something to say that would offer his friend some tiny measure of comfort. "I'm sorry, man," he said quietly. "It's…" He swallowed hard and breathed a sad sigh. "It's tough, Booth. I wish there was something I could tell you to make it feel any less shitty but, it sucks. It…"

Booth yanked off his patrol cap and ruffled his hand through his sweat-damp hair, which had grown out a bit on top since his last haircut, though it was still nowhere near the length he wore in civilian life. The voice in the back of his head murmured that he really needed to borrow Swann's clippers and give himself a trim, even if just around the back and sides. Booth thought a genuine high and tight looked odd with the beards he and the other Green Berets were sporting, but he knew he wanted to maintain some sense of order and decorum amid the madness that was Marjah. On the other hand, he thought, he could just let it be and grow out a bit, which was what the other Special Forces and SEAL operators in Afghanistan were doing. _Whatever, _he told himself. _It doesn't fucking matter, does it? _He wiggled his fingers, wanting desperately to rake them through his hair but there still wasn't quite enough length to let him do that, so instead he just rubbed his hand over his head once more and pulled his cap back on.

"The whole thing fuckin' sucks," he spat, shaking his head as he kicked at the pebbly dirt. "Sucks, sucks, sucks," he added, then fell silent again.

"It does suck," Bastone agreed with a shrug and a sympathetic pout of his lips.

Unable to think of anything more to say, Bastone left Booth to his silence. The two of them stood in the waning shadow of the chapel tent as the sun climbed higher in the sky, saying nothing between them as they watched groups of loud, happy Marines pass by en route to the mess tent. The fact that Booth had not moved a muscle in the direction of the dining facility or uttered a word about being hungry left little doubt in Bastone's mind that his friend was in a bad place.

"Are you freakin' kidding me?" a familiar voice snapped from behind them. What ordinarily would have been an irritant to Bastone's ears was instead welcome as the sound of Kennedy's sharp Boston accent and Hackett's distinctive laughter seemed to rouse Booth from his silent, brooding vigil.

"It's time," Bastone said, glancing at his watch. "Let's head on over, pal, okay?"

Blinking himself of his daze, Booth took a long, deep breath and nodded, quietly pulling himself together as Kennedy, Hackett, Swann, Lukas, Parnell and Makovsky gathered a few feet away.

"Yeah, alright," Booth grumbled, drawing a deep breath and shaking his head as he tried to put his game face on for the benefit of the rest of the team. "Guess we got some Marine asses to kick, huh?"

"Damn right we do," Bastone replied with a grin, clapping Booth on the shoulder as they walked across the dusty road to join their comrades.

* * *

**A/N: **_Chapter 12, "Easter," was originally the first third of a chapter entitled "Easter Football." However, the whole chapter got longer and more involved than expected, and so for the sake of my readers' sanity, I broke the chapter into two. Chapter 13 will be entitled (wait for it…) "Football" and will show you what happens when the Green Berets play a game of sandlot football against a squad of U.S. Marines. It will post in the next day or two._

**Editorial note: **_FauxMaven was instrumental in helping me get this one right, or as close to right as I could get it. I really should send her flowers. Or a candygram. (Now I'm having flashbacks of the old SNL "Land Shark" sketches. "Candygram." *cue Jaws music* LOL) In any case, props to FM!_


	13. Football

**Forgotten Memories, Remembered**

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**By:** dharmamonkey  
**Rating:** T  
**Disclaimer:** Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, **six** if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

* * *

**A/N:** _This chapter picks up immediately after the end of Chapter 12, "Easter." (For those who may be reading these out of sequence or who skipped Ch 12.)_

* * *

**Chapter 13: Football**

* * *

The eight soldiers didn't talk much as they made their way toward the dusty, grassless field on the far end of the base that served as a parade ground, mustering point, motor pool overflow, PT/fitness space and, occasionally, as an athletic field. Like Bastone, the others had learned to recognize when their sergeant major was in one of this dark, brooding moods, and they knew that at such times, only two of them—Booth's best friend, Bastone, and his young battle-buddy, Swann—were close enough to him to talk him out of his doldrums.

They all knew that there was only one other way to keep the sergeant major from slipping into a full-blown brooding spell once his mood seemed to darken: to distract him—in this case, with sports.

The eight men of 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, Operational Detachment Alpha 3623 arrived at the field to find their opponents from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines waiting for them. The Marines stood shoulder to shoulder with their arms crossed, their muscular bodies seemingly vibrating with strength and tension in olive green T-shirts, distinctive four-color brown digital MARPAT camouflage trousers and trademark eight-pointed utility caps.

Unintimidated, Booth and his men studied the Marines with half-lidded, unimpressed eyes before unslinging their weapons from their shoulders and stacking them in two four-rifle groups, like lethal teepees of blued steel and black polymer.

"We can take these guys," Booth said under his breath as he tore open the Velcro flap of his uniform shirt and roughly unzipped it. "We're fucking U.S. Army Special Forces. These guys are bottom-feeding Marines, huh?" He pulled his arms out of the shirt one at a time as he continued his impromptu pep-talk. "We're smarter. Better trained. More cohesive as a unit. 'From The Rest Comes The Best,' right?"

Bastone smirked as he watched Booth drape his shirt over the stacked rifles, then followed suit. "Fuckin' Marines," he sneered with a crooked grin made brighter by the contrast between his black, tufty beard and his nicotine-stained teeth.

Parnell's icy blue eyes glinted in silent agreement as he cleared his throat and spat a wad of phlegm in the dirt next to his boot, then peeled off his own uniform shirt.

"Let's do it," Lukas said, adding his shirt to the pile and yanking his sand-colored T-shirt out of his trousers. His eyes met Booth's as they waited for the rest of the team to shed their long-sleeved shirts. Booth's jaw shifted forward and he gave Lukas a faint smile as he clapped the younger sergeant on the shoulder and began to walk onto the dusty field to face their opponents.

Booth and the seven Green Berets strode onto the field, their boots making hard, scraping noises in the pebbled sand as they came to a halt a few feet away from the eight Marines who awaited them.

One of the Marines, a ruddy-faced gunnery sergeant with blond hair cut razor-close in a high and tight, stepped forward and tipped up the brim of his utility cap. He quickly surveyed the rank insignia sewn onto the soldiers' patrol caps before settling his gaze on Booth. His steely expression brightened as he smirked at the sight of the Green Berets with their scruffy beards and shaggy buzzcuts that were at least a month past needing a trim back to regulation-length.

The gunnery sergeant gave Booth an appraising, narrow-eyed glance, then grunted and said, "You boys came here to play or what?"

Booth scratched his bearded jaw, then cocked his head to the side and gave the Marine a squinting, one-eyed look. "Yup," he replied, his brow creasing as he gave the Marine a once-over of his own. "MacTavish, right?"

"Yeah," the Marine replied, his gaze flicking over Booth's shoulder to meet Makovsky's eyes before quickly turning back to the lead Green Beret. "You must be Booth, huh?"

"Yep," Booth said, a soft, crooked smile hanging off his lips as he stared back with a lazy, deliberately unimpressed look in his dark brown eyes. After a moment, he reached up and scratched the patchy growth of beard on his cheek, then propped his hands on his hips. "So how's this work?" he asked. Glancing over his shoulder at Makovsky, who helped arrange the game, he winked and turned back to his Marine counterpart.

"No punts or kicks," the Marine said. "Four downs to reach set points on the field. Two thirty-minute halves with a five-minute break in between." MacTavish jerked his chin upwards and pointed to the far end of the field. "Those markers are the goal line," he said, gesturing towards a pair of heavy wire pins with bright orange plastic flags tied onto them. "And those over there are the quarter, half and three-quarter markers." He pointed to similar markers with yellow flags. "Pretty basic," he said with a faint snicker. "Easy enough, even for a bunch of dumb G.I.s to figure out."

Standing immediately to Booth's right, Kennedy and Parnell turned to each other and exchanged a dark look, then Parnell uttered a quiet, throaty growl and stepped forward, putting every bit of his six feet and four inches of height into an intimidating display as he glared down at the shorter Marine. For a couple of seconds, neither Parnell nor the Marine moved or broke eye contact as a tense silence hung in the air between the two. Finally, Parnell narrowed his blue eyes and cocked his head to the side as he leaned in closer to the Marine.

"We're not government-issue anything, punk," he said in a low voice, clearing his throat and spitting another wad of phlegm that landed in the dirt between his boots and the Marine's. "We're Green fuckin' Berets. You punks should know that." He brought his eyes back up to meet the gunnery sergeant's, holding his gaze there for another long moment, then shook his head and took a step back, falling back in line between Booth and Kennedy.

"Huh," one of the Marines standing next to MacTavish grunted. Crossing his hard, muscular arms in front of his equally muscular chest, the tall black Marine gave Booth a long, skeptical look, then turned to MacTavish. "So, ya think we need to agree on some kind of slaughter rule up front, Gunny?"

Swann, standing to Booth's left, snorted. "We don't need no slaughter rule," he said. "Unless you guys are afraid we'd run up the score."

"Fat fucking chance of that," the young black Marine replied, arching his brow sharply as he gestured towards Booth with a jerk of his chin. "So, is grandpa here your coach or what?"

The cocky, amused smirk on Booth's face quickly melted away and was replaced by a stony, hard-jawed stare, but before Booth could speak, Hackett raised the brim of his Arizona State ballcap with a disdainful huff.

"He's our quarterback, you ignorant fuck," he told the Marines, who laughed and snickered in response. "Yeah?" Hackett snapped defensively. "Well, keep on laughing, jarhead. Remember—John Elway won the Super Bowl at age thirty-seven and came back the next year to do it again at thirty-eight."

Booth shifted his weight from one foot to another, straightening up proudly as he turned to Hackett with a wink. He was used to having to prove himself, especially since the afternoon he met the men of Alpha 3623, and knew that if he could prove his worthiness and leadership in _their _eyes, he could prove it to anyone.

"Okay," Booth said, reaching into his thigh pocket where he'd stashed his Oakley sunglasses with their red-mirrored lenses. He jerked his T-shirt out of his trousers and pulled a tiny optics cloth out of hip pocket to wipe the smudges off his shades.

"Now that that's settled…" He rolled his eyes at the Marines, then slid his sunglasses over his eyes with a smirk. "I propose we flip a coin to decide who gets first possession. Loser of the coin toss picks their end of the field and shirts or skins."

MacTavish nodded. "You got a coin?"

Booth laughed. "Wait. We play on your home turf and you guys can't even manage to show up with a nickel to flip? Shit." He reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a well-worn white poker chip embossed with the logo of Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. Pointing to the stylized profile of the casino's Roman namesake on one side of chip, he said, "That's heads. You call it." He flipped the chip as MacTavish called tails in midair, then caught the chip and slapped it on the top of his hand. "Tails it is."

"We'll let you guys take first possession," the Marine said with a grin. "You know—give you a chance to get on the board before we start kicking your asses."

"Right." Booth rolled his eyes even though they were hidden behind his mirrored Oakleys. "Keep talkin', Marine," he said. "We'll take that end…" He pointed at the far end of the field, adjacent to the sand-filled bastions that formed the protective wall around the encampment. "And we'll be skins."

Booth and the Green Berets peeled off their T-shirts, threaded them into the front sights of their respective rifles, then jogged down to their end of the field. The midday sun was high in the sky and warmed their bare arms and shoulders as they pulled into a huddle.

"I picked this end because they'll have to be looking into the sun in the second half," Booth told the others. "We can take these guys, but we've gotta be patient." He looked around the huddle and smiled. "We're better at being patient than they are. Marines are frontal-assault types. Shock troops. We're more subtle, surgical, nuanced. We're more patient and we know how to play the margins. We play smart—the same way we fight, okay?"

Swann grinned, his blue eyes bright as he watched his leader rally the troops the way only Booth could.

"Eight man football means three up front, two out, two back and one in the pocket, okay? Lukas—you, Bastone and Kennedy be my blockers. Swann and Parnell—you're tall and fast, so I want you downrange as my receivers. Hackett and Makovsky, you're my running backs and my protection if they get past the boys up front."

The men nodded as they considered their assignments.

"Come on, Booth," Bastone said with a laugh and a teasing twinkle in his eye. "Admit it. You just want me playing center 'cause you want to touch my ass." The younger sergeants snickered.

Booth arched his brow, then glowered at Bastone across the huddle. "Bastone, you bunk next to me. If I'd wanted your ass, I'd have taken it weeks ago. Face it, pal. You're just not my type."

Kennedy tried to contain his laugh but failed, sending the whole huddle into a fit of laughter. Once the laughter died down into suppressed snickers, Booth shook his head and continued.

"These guys are young," he said. "Best I can tell, the gunnery sergeant's in his late twenties or early thirties. The rest of them are in their late teens or early twenties—probably lance corporals and sergeants, tops. They're young guys so they're gonna be quick on their feet, lots of energy, but we've got endurance and brains. We can beat 'em."

Bastone thrust his hand in the middle of the huddle and the others quickly did the same, piling their hands one on top of the other as the first sergeant gave the others a hard, expectant look. "Let's do it," he grunted out. "Hoo-_aah!"_

"Hooah!"

The two teams lined up halfway between midfield and the Green Berets' goal line. The gunnery sergeant and the mouthy black Marine stood in the backfield as linebackers while the younger Marines filled in as the defensive line and defensive backs.

Booth lined up behind Bastone, tapping out the snap count with his heel as he looked up and down the Army line of scrimmage. "Hut one, hut two, hut three!" On three, Booth tapped the inside of Bastone's thigh and the first sergeant snapped the ball. Booth dropped back, carefully watching as Lukas, Kennedy and Bastone tangled with the three thick-necked Marine linemen.

Hackett came around from the left and Booth leaned right, faking a handoff before dropping a few steps back and to the left. He looked downfield and saw Swann swing across the field at the end of his question mark-shaped route, three or four steps ahead of his Marine defender. Booth drilled the ball downfield, aiming a bit higher than he normally would as he watched Swann jump up and pluck the ball out of the air with his big, long-fingered hands before being tackled by a Marine defensive back.

"First down!" Booth declared, pointing to the yellow-flagged marker behind where Swann caught the pass. "Yeah, baby!"

On the next snap, Booth faked a handoff to Makovsky before whirling around and handing the football to Hackett, who tucked the ball against his belly and swung left, allowing Booth to block as MacTavish and the other Marines surged towards Hackett's intended path.

The tall, muscular black Marine read the fake in time to run past Kennedy's outstretched arm but Booth saw him coming. Leaning forward to lower his center of gravity, Booth launched himself shoulder-first at the Marine, pushing him aside. One of the Marines finally caught up with Hackett about ten feet short of the goal line, wrestling the freckle-shouldered, hairy-chested Arizonan to the ground.

As Hackett picked himself up and dusted himself off, the black Marine grinned crookedly and adjusted his utility cap as he made his way back towards the Marine huddle.

"Hey Gramps!" he called out over his shoulder, watching to see if Booth would react. "You gonna stay in that pocket all day?"

The cocky taunt made Booth laugh. "Hey," he said with an exaggerated shrug. "I been here waitin' for ya, buddy." Booth opened his arms wide and waggled his fingers, daring the Marine to go after him. "You got an open invitation but it's okay. Take your time, pal. We'll leave milk and cookies out for you when you finally decide to drop in…"

The Marine was about to hurl back a retort when MacTavish smacked him on the back of the head. "Don't play fuckin' mindgames with these douchebags, Jackson," the gunnery sergeant told the younger Marine. "These SF guys are damn near spooks. Just look at 'em with their beards and shaggy hair and shit. They're all about fuckin' with your head." MacTavish tapped his temple and gave Jackson a pointed look. "Don't let 'em in, alright? Just play fuckin' football the way you know how and we'll be fine."

Booth walked back to the huddle with a smirk as he heard the gunnery sergeant lecture his teammate. "Good job, guys," he told his comrades. "These guys are already rattled six ways to Sunday. Let's do a flea-flicker." Parnell's blond brows furrowed with skepticism but Booth waved him off. "Swann, let's swap you and Hackett out. I want you and your big mitts and sticky fingers in the backfield with me. Hackett, run a hook route, okay? Parnell—you're my man, Southie. Run a post, left to the corner. Swann and I will do our thing back here, and draw the coverage towards the line of scrimmage on the right. You should be wide open by the time I'm ready to send it downrange to you. We go on two, okay? Quick snap. Be ready, Bastone."

"Let's do it!" Kennedy growled.

The huddle broke with a clap and a guttural _hooah _as everyone took their places. Given that it was only the third play the Green Berets had run, the Marines didn't think much of the fact that the tall, lanky Iowan was lining up in the backfield behind Booth while the shorter, stockier Arizonan was lining up on the far right edge of the formation.

Booth crouched down behind his center. "Hut one, hut _two!_"

Bastone snapped the ball to Booth, who quickly took a step back and tossed the ball underhanded to Swann, who ran forward with it several steps before tossing it back to Booth. The Marines rushed to Swann's side of the line as soon as he caught the lateral from Booth and were caught flat-footed when Swann flipped the ball back to Booth. The feint worked, allowing Booth to roll left and drill the ball downfield to Parnell, who cut away from the middle, leaving behind a confused Marine defender as he reached up and caught the pass from Booth, running in untouched for the score.

"Yes!" Booth threw his arms up in triumph, pumping his fist as he made his way towards the end zone where the rest of the Green Berets had run to celebrate with Parnell. Swann held back, grinning from ear to ear as he clapped Booth on the back.

"Good job, kiddo," Booth said to Swann, grabbing his young comrade in a loose chokehold and pulling him close in an affectionate hug. "We're gonna get these guys," he said, speaking quietly into Swann's ear before letting him go. "We can hold our own."

"Damn right we can," Swann agreed with a wide grin.

The Green Berets did indeed hold their own and kept the game close.

In the end, after an hour of play, two skinned elbows, one badly scraped forearm, scores of sweaty, dusty tackles, and a combined eleven touchdowns, the Marines won, six touchdowns to five.

The two teams queued up to congratulate one another on a game well-played, moving down the line as each player shook hands with the men on the opposing team and gave them a brotherly clap on the back as he passed by.

Booth took his place at the end of the line behind Parnell, grinning as he watched his men laugh and joke with the victorious Marines, who just minutes earlier had been their sworn enemies on the dusty makeshift gridiron behind them. Seeing his team pull together and hold their own against a group of younger, faster men (not one as old as Booth, Parnell, Bastone or Kennedy) made Booth beam with pride even though the Marines won the day.

Though he had only been with the Alpha for a couple of months, with every day he served beside them his admiration and fondness for them grew. Though it hadn't been easy to win the respect of the two hardened, skeptical master sergeants, after six weeks in-country, Parnell and Kennedy had gradually, if somewhat grudgingly, accepted his leadership. Booth never took it personally that the men of the Alpha regarded him warily when he first assumed his post as the NCOIC.

_Hell, _he told himself. _Had it been me, and some cocky retread asshole came rolling into the unit and wanted to tell me how to do my job, I'd have told him to get fucked, too._

Booth stood behind Parnell, waiting to shake hands with the Marines, and found himself staring at the way the sun reflected off the sweaty tattoo on the Bostonian's right shoulder. _De oppreso liber, _the calligraphed letters read on an unfurled scroll beneath a five-pointed ivy leaf, combining the motto of the Army Special Forces (_"Freeing the Oppressed") _with the symbol of the Parnellite branch of the Irish nationalist movement, named for Parnell's great, great, great-uncle, Charles Stewart Parnell_._

Booth smirked as he remembered the night of St. Patrick's Day, when he, Kennedy, Parnell and Bastone sat outside the unit's temporary barracks tent, smoking Bastone's cigarettes and Booth's cigars, listening to Kennedy's mix of Irish folk rock and drinking the awful hooch that he'd brewed from God-knows-what. They sat out there for an hour that night, talking about nationalism, freedom and the price of each (since, the four agreed, nationalism didn't always lead to real freedom).

_How lucky am I? _Booth mused. _To be able to serve with men like this? _There wasn't a man in the detachment that Booth didn't, for one reason or another, admire as a comrade and, as the weeks ran into months, love as a brother.

"Good game, Gramps," MacTavish said with a crooked smirk as he clapped Booth on the shoulder, his greeting pulling Booth out of his reverie. He waited to see if Booth would offer a handshake, considering the bandage wrapped snugly around the grizzle-bearded soldier's arm.

Late in the game's second half, Staff Sergeant Jackson had rushed past Lukas, nearly steamrolling him as he dodged Bastone's attempted block and lunged at Booth. Booth managed to release the ball, delivering a perfect spiral to Swann before landing hard on his right side. Once he picked himself up and dusted himself off, Booth realized he was bleeding from the underside of his right forearm, where one of the tiny stones that dotted the grassless playing field had sliced into his skin and embedded itself in his flesh. Picking the stone out of his skin not only hurt but made the wound bleed more profusely, and Swann went running to the Humvee to fetch his field medical kit. A few minutes later, after Swann irrigated and disinfected the wound and bandaged it up, the game resumed, and Booth continued playing quarterback despite the way his throwing arm smarted with each snap he took.

Booth pulled off his sunglasses and tucked them atop his patrol cap and grinned back, extending his hand and shaking MacTavish's heartily. "Fuckin' smart ass gyrene," he grumbled in feigned offense. "Seriously, though. You guys played well. Kept us on our toes the whole game."

Releasing Booth's hand, MacTavish gave a modest shrug. "You guys kept it closer than I thought you would," he said. Taking a moment to glance over his shoulder at the rest of his team, who stood nearby chatting with the Green Berets, the Marine turned back to Booth with a warm, genuine smile.

"We've been watching you SF guys work since we got here in country four months ago, but seeing how you guys worked as a team today? Well…" MacTavish shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at the ground, kicking the toe of his boot into the pale, gravel-strewn sand. Looking up again, his eyes squinting in the afternoon sun, he grabbed his utility cap and squeezed the deeply-curved brim between his thumb and forefingers as he considered his words.

"We should have fucking pulverized you guys," he said, the teasing edge to his voice having fallen away in favor of a deep seriousness. "My Marines are younger, bigger, stronger and a damn sight faster than you and your guys. Hell, my team's…" MacTavish paused a moment to think, mentally thumbing through his team's roster and ranks. "I'm an E-7, but the rest of my team are...three E-2s, two E-3s and two E-4s. Your guys are, what?"

Booth turned and looked to his right where Swann, Makovsky and Bastone were smoking cigarettes with four of the Marines.

"I'm an E-9," he said, pointing to the sergeant major insignia sewn on the front of his patrol cap. "Bastone, Kennedy and Parnell are E-8s. Lukas is an E-7. Makovsky, Hackett and Swann are E-6s. Swann's the baby of the group. Twenty-two." Booth reached up and scratched his bearded jaw, which seemed to itch more on account of the sweat that dribbled off his temples and lodged itself in his scraggly growth. "But even he's done two tours in Iraq and is on his second one here. The rest of these guys have a lot more combat tours under their belt than that. Bastone's on his fifth tour here in the 'Stan alone, and that's not counting his repeat trips to Iraq."

MacTavish nodded, then narrowed his gaze as he studied Booth's dark eyes and the crow's feet in their corners. "And you?"

Booth grimaced and looked away. "I been around," he said, reaching across his chest and wiping away a bead of sweat that had loosened and was dribbling down his right side.

Sensing that he'd said something wrong, MacTavish brought the subject back to football. "Yeah," he said with a vaguely uneasy grin. "Well, we should've kicked you guys' asses, but instead, we barely won. If Jackson hadn't have drilled you in the ground like that…" He pointed at Booth's bandaged arm. "You guys would've at least tied it up."

MacTavish's admission drew a toothy smile from Booth as he grunted out a quiet laugh. "We'll get you next time," Booth said as a teasing flicker softened his brown eyes. "I'm thinkin' a Christmas rematch is in order."

The Marine's mouth curved into a mischievous grin as he extended his hand again. "You got yourself a deal," he said. "And we'll beat your fuckin' asses again." He punctuated his declaration with a waggle of his brows.

"Keep talkin', gyrene," Booth said with an upward jerk of his chin as he rolled his eyes and shook MacTavish's hand. "Fuckin' big mouth Marines..."

The Marine laughed and retrieved a cigarette from his chest pocket, a smirk glinting in his eyes as he cupped his hands over his mouth and lit the cigarette.

"Fuckin' cocky-ass bearded bastards…"

* * *

**A/N: **_So there you have it. Shirtless soldiers playing sandlot tackle football and talking trash with Marines. On Easter. Seven thousand miles from home. I hope it was worth the read. _

_The Marine unit in question (Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 6th Marines) is real and spearheaded the Marjah campaign in the spring of 2010. Camp Marjah is a real place. If you Google "Life at Camp Marjah LiveLeak" you'll find a video that documents how rough the conditions were at that base in spring/summer 2010. (Lest you think I make all this shit up.)_

_In any case, I hope you liked this chapter. Please let me know you're reading these, and that something in them matters to you. It really makes a difference to hear from my readers. Drop me a line. Please consider leaving a review._

**Editorial note: **_Yet again, these last two chapters were made better by the brilliant beta-reading efforts of the one and only _**FauxMaven**_, whose critical eye and overall ass-kicking are making me a better writer every time she wields her magic electronic "pen" :-) Thank you, my friend!_


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